[zanny]

Until there is legitimate competition in these spaces you will keep getting "up to X mbps" and "for the first 50GB, subject to change" in every providers terms.

It doesn't help that actually pricing out Internet access is more complex than X cents per byte. For most providers data between the hours of 0100 to 0600 would be free because of how little network usage there is, while data from 1700 to 2300 would be most expensive due to that being when everyone is using the network simultaneously. But throughout the years there have been very few time limited unlimited plans.

And even then, its not actually "expensive" to use the Internet in the evening. Its just saturated, and pressures the ISP to either throttle everyone or expand capacity. Expanding capacity is expensive, but just promising "up to X mbps" is easy and I'm surprised at how eager operators are to adopt data caps over simply throttling heavy data users during peak times.

Well, I'm not really surprised, because the former lets you hit people with surprise bills for ludicrous amounts while the later just saturates your useless customer support lines with complaints.

[namibj]

My old university dorm internet was like that. There were 3 or 4 time zones per day, and only the few hours in the middle of the night were unlimited, otherwise iirc 500GB/month, measured by double and iirc. even triple-counting during prime time and such. For some reasons they were rather oversubscribed, offering 1000BASE-T in the dorms (with some L2 crypto auth), but only had 10Gbit/s fiber uplink in a few dorms. Considering they already had active equipment on both sides, this shouldn't be much of a problem though.