>Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? I mean, there's a physical limitation to how much data a given amount of

>Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? I mean, there's a physical limitation to how much data a given amount of cable can transfer at any time. Some of bandwidth caps are likely to prevent people from streaming as much data as they can 24/7 otherwise considerably more cable would have to be run, not unlike adding more pipes when more housing additions are added to an area (think of Sim City when you'd need to add more water infrastructure when you'd have more buildings). Data usage is actually increasing at a mind-boggling rate, there are plenty of good articles about this on the internet. If we look at Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic We see in 2000 1.008 EB of IP traffic, in 2010 it jumps to 241.812 EB, 2017 jumps to 1,464 EB! Mobile traffic went from 86.412 EB in 2016 to 144 EB in 2017!!! (those above numbers are taken from Cisco whitepapers cited in the Wiki entry) Ericcson has a good one here about mobile data increase: https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/future-mobile-data-usage-and-traffic-growth https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/future-mobile-da... If you look at the numbers you see that at the current growth rates, there really is a valid reason to limit data usage as much as possible by providers via datacaps. While their current cabling can likely handle the demand, they're almost certainly going to reach a point in the near future where they simply can't deploy cable enough to keep up with the annual increases.