No Stupid Questions

cell phone providers can, they just won’t (would eat into their profits)

and most of the home internet sold as “unlimited” was a scam – if you started to get too close to some hidden value, they would start throttling your connection

In the past it was due to technical constraints.

Now it's just greed.

Not all home internet is unlimited. In many US rural areas, home internet connections have a monthly cap just like mobile networks do. A higher cap costs more, if it's available at all.

Umm, my home internet has a 50GB per month limit. Can't complain much though, it's cheap at literally $1 a day, and I'm not a gamer or online streamer.

My home Internet charges extra when I use more than 1 TB per month. Not sure but I think it's metered both up and down.

For cell / mobile phones, you're sharing the capacity of the cell among multiple people.

In this example, a rural cell tower can provide up to 395Mbps.

It would only take 40 people watching Kayo at high definition (or any high definition video service) via their phone or a 4G router to saturate this tower.

For everyone else at this time, it'll still work but even though they might have a strong radio signal (lots of bars), the internet will become slow.

Limiting monthly usage, or charging more for more data per month, reduces the risk of saturation.

In theory at least it’s because you pay for a specific bandwidth for home internet (the size of the pipe) but a specific amount of data for cellular (how much stuff you can get through a fixed sized pipe).

Home internet is a little unique in that way, almost all other utilities are consumption based with no real tiers in terms of how it’s delivered (you pay for the volume of water or gas you use, electricity is the same, just different units).

Networking equipment gets more expensive based on the bandwidth it supports, but it doesn’t much care how many bits you push through it. So ISPs charge based on their capacity to deliver those bits, and provide tiers at different price points. Cellular though is much more bandwidth constrained due to the technologies (and it used to be much more so before LTE and 5G), so it didn’t makes sense to charge you for slow or slower tiers. Instead the limiting factor is the capacity of a tower so by limiting data to small amounts it naturally discourages use. That model carried forward even now that the technologies support broadband speeds in some cases. As such and ISP could provide the biggest pipe (highest speed) to all homes and just charge based on consumption (they used to in the days of dial up, and satellite before starlink always has). Many ISPs instead are now double dipping though and charging for both.

Home Internet usually doesn't have unlimited internet. There's usually caps baked in somewhere. Don't believe me? Read the fine print. At some point, at some bandwidth usage in the monthly cycle, they will throttle the living crap out of your connection. It's written into pretty much every contract I've ever signed, and I've been with over a dozen carriers of landline internet over the years.

The reason being that they don't want you serving websites or business class functionality with residential level internet. They didn't build their network with those constraints. They want you paying for and using the business internet package, which has dedicated bandwidth and no caps because you're paying for a dedicated line to be run.

For mobile phones? Old pricing models still trying to be relevant. There's no technical reason.

money.

data caps are coming to home internet soon too and with inescapable hidden contracts; switch to an independent isp to avoid it before you're entrapped into one.

AT&T asks the same question. They provide the bold option to pay more than the competition and get data limits on your home internet.

I went over my home data cap a couple times. The ISP rep was not amused when I called to have them bump my speed down to the lowest tier and add unlimited data. I pay less now and the speed difference is not noticeable for me with daily usage. I told them I was going to download random crap all day, delete, and redownload out of spite lol.

Caps are fake there's no need for them besides to build golden marble pillars outside CEOs mega mansions.

You're one of the lucky ones

Lots of home internet does have a data cap, but you might not realize it. Typically what will happen is that, once you hit your cap, you'll be rate throttled. That throttle might not affect most video streaming since Netflix is really good at video compression, but you'll see the hit if you are, for instance, downloading large games from PSN, Steam, etc.

You might want to ask Ajit Pai.

If my phone didn't have a cap, I'd hotspot it all, which is basically the idea of cellular home internet routers. I found a home router without a cap, which time will tell to be true, but it's still more expensive than my phone with a very large but not unlimited cap.

They want to get paid, that's the reasoning. The amount of data is really irrelevant except for pricing.

Roaming fees used to be the same until EU stepped in. Hopefully EU will eventually step in and order a full stop to ALL CAPS too. We live in the "future" now, right? Bring me my free unlimited connection so I can download that car they talked about.

I have the opposite. Unlimited phone data, but it throttles above some high number that I've never hit. Capped home internet from crapcast, 1.3 TB, I haven't hit it but I've come within a couple gigabytes.

They offer unlimited data if I use their modem/router for an extra $10/mo. Of course their modem comes with the wonderful feature of a public hotspot for any other Comcast customers in the area. I've been thinking about getting their modem, putting it in a metal box and just using pass through with my opnsense box.

Playing devil's advocate here. A possibly legitimate reason ISPs put in data caps is wireless spectrum congestion.

AOL used to be $19.95/mo for forty hours, then an additional charge per minute beyond that.

I guess it depends what country you're in. I don't have limits on either and don't want to imagine having that concern.