[skinsguy]

And in my opinion, ISPs instituting data caps is just another way to get around net neutrality. Knowing that you're up against a data cap, you're not likely to watch Netflix or You Tube videos, or stream music from your favorite website. It would naturally limit you on your usage. And what burns me up is that these ISPs, like AT&T, will dangle the carrot of offering you gigabit speeds, but then turn around and slap a data cap on you. Come on...the biggest reason why people would purchase gigabit service is to better support services such as Skype, Netflix, and faster download speeds of large files. If I know I have a data limit that is realistically reachable within a month, I know I can't freely use the internet the way it was intended.

I'm currently with Time Warner (which, of course, got bought out by Comcast) and I looked at my data usage just the other day. My wife and I have been streaming a lot more since we reinstated Netflix. Therefore, my data usage shot up almost triple from what we were using beforehand. From what I saw, it looks like there is a "soft" data cap with Time Warner, but the cap is set high enough where you'd have to be downloading HD movies (or torrents) on a daily basis while streaming Netflix on a daily basis. We don't really do a lot of major downloading of anything (unless I'm downloading a TV show from iTunes or Linux Distros), but we do use Netflix and Amazon Prime Video on a regular basis. While gigabit speeds are enticing for me for streaming as well as upload speeds (if I decide to Skype), not if there is a strict data cap like what you get with cell phone companies.