Unmetered costs more. I don't know about Canada or US, but in Russia it's certain that your ISP pays for their uplink channels several times more than you would

Unmetered costs more. I don't know about Canada or US, but in Russia it's certain that your ISP pays for their uplink channels several times more than you would for the same bandwidth. Partially, that's because there are completely different SLAs, but that's also because a good share of users are consuming moderately (like web browsing) with only accidental high-traffic spikes. If every customer online will try to get their promised bandwidth at the same time - ISP will literally choke - and nobody would get even remotely satisfying connection. That's why ISPs have to impose bandwidth limits. Here, they're commonly shaping down the line after the traffic cap's hit. In fact, I believe almost every ISP - unless they're monopoly - would be happy to drop the prices while keeping the satisfable service quality. Unfortunately, most of time they just can't (and when they can, they surely do). Also, while it's certainly none of my business, I sometimes wonder why some individuals download terabytes of information per month. Considering the most heavy application I know of - downloading raw BD rips - they have to watch a movie every single evening. Must be quite a bad taste for a videophile, to say the least. For less traffic-heavy content, they just won't be able to consume it in time. I'm not saying that terabytes are not needed - sure there're cases where even petabytes might be necessary - but there're too many users who download whole day and night every month. Well, at least the Internets are backed up...