Mine at least lets me adjust the upload and download ratio for my plan. I'm currently on 50/20, but I could upgrade my plan and get 100/20, 70/50, or whatever I want. But 50/20 has been plenty for me, and we're getting municipal fiber soon so I'll have more options as well.
AFAIK, cable doesn't offer that, you get 5mbps on pretty much every plan, or you upgrade to some ridiculous tier to get faster upload.
I had gigabit a long time ago, and while it was nice, I'm unwilling to pay for it. 50/25 is good enough for me, and it costs less than half what gigabit would cost ($55/month vs $125/month). I just checked, and apparently all plans have half the upload vs download, so that's nice.
Our new service promises to be $60-70 for 250 symmetric, and that would only get me 100/50 at my current ISP, so I'll probably be getting that upgrade when it's available.
I hate Comcast as much as the next guy but I feel like 1.5TB a month would be reasonable. Even at those speeds you probably wouldn't be downloading more, just downloading whatever you do now but faster.
E: I was gonna ask why this was so controversial but I just checked my routers stats and, oh yeah I've only downloaded around half a terabyte over 3 segregated VLANs in the past 2 months. I've uploaded almost double that which is baffling to me though. Even still I don't see why anyone would be downloading anything more that a terabyte in a month unless your one of those data hoarders, which fair but.. I'll stop my rambling.
Why the fuck would I want that speed if I can only fully use it for less than a second before hitting the data cap? I'd rather have 100 times less speed with 100 times more cap, so I can actually fully use it however I want.
Also it's just ridiculous anyway because I don't even think hard drive write speeds are that fast.
There should be, that's just how fiber works. If they lay a 10 Gb line in the street, they'll probably sell a 1 Gb connection to a 100 households. (Margins depend per provider and location)
If they give you an uncapped connection to the entire wire, you'll DoS the rest of the neighborhood
That's why people are complaining "I bought 1Gb internet, but I'm only getting 100Mb!" - They oversold bandwidth in a busy area. 1Gb would probably be the max speed if everyone else was idle. If they gave everyone uncapped connections the problem would get even worse
You’re taking about data rates here, measured in bits per second.
Data caps have to do with the total amount of data you are allocated over a longer period of time. Usually per month. In the case of Comcast, it’s 1.5 TB/month.
If the customer exceeds that allotment during the month, they will be charged an additional “overage fee” per arbitrary unit, usually by the gigabyte.
It has nothing to do with the speed they advertise on a line, but rather a way to charge “heavy users” more.
you're talking about a bandwidth cap, not a data cap. data caps are when you get throttled after downloading a certain amount of data or get charged extra. think phone data plans where you have 10 or 20gb or whatever per month
Data caps are simply false advertising - if your infrastructure can only handle X Tb/s then sell lower client speeds or implement some clever QoS.
There are plenty of users for whom 1.5TB is quite or very restrictive - multi member households, video/photo editors working with raw data, scientists working with raw data, flatpak users with Nvidia GPU or people that selfhost their data or do frequent backups etc.
With the popularity of WFH and our dependence on online services the internet is virtually as vital as water or electricity, and you wouldn't want to be restricted to having no electricity until the end of the month just because you used the angle grinder for a few afternoons.
I'm on pace for 0.60 TB this month and I'm no heavy user. I only have 1 4k TV and a laptop for work that I use all day. My wife is mostly on her phone but is a heavy TV user in the evening. I can imagine people who download and/or torrent most of the content they consume can easily hit 1.5TB