That may be true where you live, but down here in NZ, unlimited means unlimited (on fibre). Our competitive ISP market means that all major ISPs have completely ditched their fair usage policies.

I regularly use well over 10TB a month and have never had any issues from multiple ISPs. We have a regulation-enforced split between ISPs and the line owners, meaning anyone can set up an ISP for a relatively low capital cost by leasing access to the last mile fibre lines to customers. As such, there are plenty of nation-wide ISPs here.

In the UK, because ISPs "abused" the fact that were was no formal definition of "unlimited" (NTHell kneecapping your speed if you downloaded too much in a given period for example), ISPs now have to disclose up front in plain language things like traffic shaping and speed limiting (and adding them after the fact is grounds to exit your contract early - heck my last ISP increased their standard pricing (which would effect any discounted pricing they offered) by a couple of quid a month and had to offer anyone who wanted to the ability to exit their contract early at no charge).

Once a few ISPs started offering "truly unlimited broadband" where they couldn't hide anything, (the big) ISPs that did shape traffic speed limit where now fighting on their back foot, so most of them stepped up and started offering "truly unlimited broadband" too.

Some networks/ISPs may lower speeds in an area due to capacity on a backhaul, but if your speed drops below the minimum outlined at the beginning of your contract for longer than 30 days you can exit your contract early.

So most of the ISPs (in the UK) who offer unlimited contracts these days will have a FUP but they mainly focus on a) no reselling their services b) not running open proxies c) not sending solicited bulk emails, spam emails, calls, sms, etc (because the FUP also covers the landline bundled in with the internet connection it covers things like 118,0871/2/3 service limits and mass calling). They tend not to fret about download caps in their FUPs. Heck I was on a unlimited 4G connection for a while and easily used over 1TB per month and didn't even get a text message asking me to "tone it down".

EDIT: Just checked and my providers FUP is 3 (well 2 and a third) pages long, written in easy to understand language (no legalese), and hasn't even been updated in the past 5 years.

Sure but it's also the colloquial name for a fixed-price variable service with no hard shutoff plan which is the plan everyone wants.

Like I can't understand why so many people get butthurt about the word unlimited when I can play hours and hours of video games, have multiple 4k streams constantly going, casual piracy and two adult fully remote workers in video calls all day for like $80/mo and not a penny more.

> The standard monthly quota plans are 1TB and 10TB for residential, and 2TB and 20TB for SOHO/business, which is pretty workable for most use cases.

How much does it cost to upgrade from 1TB to 10TB?

I don't care how common a cap like that is, or what abominable caps some other service might have. 1TB for a whole month is only 3 megabits per second average, and that is not a good amount. And it should definitely be possible to buy more than 30 megabits per second average for a residence. For a business, 20TB in a month is good for a few employees but breaks down very fast if they start working remotely.

More than 1TB a month. Just downloading one game from Steam can easily be more than 100GB these days. Downloading ML weights churns through gigabytes easily, as does downloading or streaming 4K movies.

What's the point of having gigabit download speed if you have to constantly worry about using up your cap? And paying an extra £5 for every 250GB extra seems like some arbitrary punishment for power users.

They don't pay for infrastructure based on bytes transferred so why should I as a customer pay this random made up number?