You'd have to read the fine print in the agreement you signed. Comcast is one that I'm aware of that says "unlimited" but if you exceed a large amount of data, they'll throttle your speed to something unacceptably low for the remainder of the month. (I believe it used to be 350GB but I can't believe it's still that low.)

Do you mean home ISP or mobile provider? What country? Who is the provider? In the US, some ISPs (especially those with monopoly) charge after ~1-1.5TB/month which is complete bullshit (fuck you comcast who was hated so much by consumers they rebranded to xfinity)

Most providers/teocos have a Fair Usage Policy in their Terms and Conditions. It will spell out the max amount you can use under their "unlimited" plan.

If you exceed that amount, usually they will throttle your speed to a crawl which is also stated in the T&C.

Oh it's unlimited all right! But everything above some data threshold will be transmitted at 10 kb/s. See, they upheld their part!

Nothing is ever unlimited. I once rented a server with unlimited storage, so I fork bombed it and basically used the unlimited storage. Turned out, they added storage to my account when I reached 75% of my storage. Turned out, they kinda paid me to stop.

It depends on

1. Where you are in the world.
2. If you're talking about mobile or home internet (or both)
3. What provider you have.

In the states, I've never hit a wall of any kind on my home internet. I'm on fiber now, but when I was on cable it was the same, in several different states. In general, as soon as one of the (usually only two, because USA broadband monopolies yay!) providers for the area tried to implement some kind of cap, everyone in the area just jumped onto the other provider and the cap eventually went away because they were hemorrhaging customers.

For mobile, its vastly different. There are only a couple cell providers in the whole united states that actually offer uncapped unlimited data, and both of those still come with stipulations, usually things like "During peak hours your bandwidth may be throttled" or something similar. They also cost $80 to $100+ per month. Most cell providers in the states throttle you hard when you go over a certain cap, usually 15-30gb depending on the provider, and what kind of contract you got. You can still connect, but you're now running at 256kbs or something terrible. So technically, its still unlimited, just useless until next month when your cap refreshes.

Knowing who your provider is would (might) help. Xfinity has a 1TB or 1.2TB soft cap, which you can exceed once or twice a year without concern. Beyond that you fall into their top (I think it's) 1% of users and may be asked to scale back or to pay an excess usage fee (which was non-trivial the last time I looked - something like $10/50GB).

You would need to look at the terms of service with your provider.

For my home internet, I'm pleased to have municipal fiber optic broadband in my city.
I don't know what the width of the bottleneck is or where it's located (because there will always be one) but i have never hit it.

I also use T-Mobile for my cellular data.
They were fairly straightforward with me about how it works:
The data transfer bandwidth will never be throttled by 'decree',
though it is finite and everyone connected to the same signal tower as I am are all going to have to share whatever is available
up to the hardware limitations of the mobile devices themselves which are connected.
however, after I have downloaded approximately 10 gigabytes of data, my pings are to be de-prioritized. If there is not a lot of activity on the network, then connections establish in a snappy and responsive manner. If there is a lot of network traffic, however, I may have to 'wait my turn' while other people who have not downloaded as much get to go first, to an extent. Once the connection is established, the speed of data transfer is just as fast as before. It just takes longer for that connection to be established in the first place.

I am satisfied with this arrangement.

I am in India. Here, broadband providers give 3.33 TB of high speed usage, after which the speed gets limited to 1mbps. Some postpaid mobile plans also have "unlimited" usage, but they give only 100GB data, and if you exceed it, they convert your regular plan to a commercial plan and will bill you a relatively huge amount.

If it has a limit, it isn't unlimited.

In which case, it is false advertisement.

Go sue them for it.

USA companies can legally lie. Europe they can't.

Between me and my room mate we've downloaded approximately 1202tb this month and uploaded about 105tb.

AFAIK unlimited = unlimited. If there's a limit we've not hit it yet.

New Lemmy Post: When my boradband provider says "Unlimited usage" do they really mean "Unlimited" or is it only X amount? (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/9799031)
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