Well mobile data is very different. With fibre optic you can generally keep provisioning more cables and a single cable already carries a huge amount already.

Radio has an absolute efficiency limit for the bandwidth of a signal and we're pretty damn close to that now.

5g uses wider bandwidth channels, with more cells closer together and uses things like beamforming. But there's still always going to be an upper limit that is considerably lower than fibre.

This is why they likely want to discourage 5g becoming a full alternative to wired, because there's just not the capacity to do it on the same scale.

If you really think about it, caps on mobile data are also fairly stupid

Mobile is a shared medium and can only support a certain amount of bandwidth per phone mast (in a certain area). A mobile phone network heavily relies on most users not using their data plans most of the time.

In France at least I doubt it.

The only time I remember caps on landlines was when 56k modem were still the norm. Once ADSL was rolled out there was pretty much no caps anymore.

I think the fact that we had some healthy competition for landlines from the get go in my country meant the ISPs couldn't get that much greedy and put caps in place. So it never ended being common where I live.

And when it was old school modems, well you were already paying for the phone communications anyway when connected to the internet so it wasn't really unlimited anyway.

Agreed. In the past you would pay for calling and text messages and data was often unlimited at the higher tiers, but since nobody pays extra for calling and texting anymore, they’re now charging for data. Luckily they can’t charge extra for EU roaming anymore.

Data caps on landlines is something that I haven’t seen for a very long time in my EU country. The last time I had a subscription with a data cap must have been with a 56k modem, if at all. Cable and DSL might have had fair use policies back in the day (or maybe they still do, who knows), but no hard cap. Or at least not that I can remember.

Internet nowadays is way too important to have data caps, especially at home. 5G should definitely be next. Differentiate in speed all you want, but ditch the caps.

Belgium has them

Data caps do exist in Europe, but they're generally reserved for ultra cheap data plans. Something like €5 for 100mbit speeds. So you get a decent connection, but limited in traffic instead. Which makes sense.

While it's stupid that ISPs are using their monopolies to screw consumers, the concept of data caps is not as stupid as you might think.

You're not just paying for the connection between you and the ISP, but also all the other data links that get your internet traffic to its destination. For example, those cables across the ocean are owned third parties and they charge money for every byte that goes through. It wouldn't be unreasonable for ISPs to pass that cost to users.

Furthermore, most links are overprovisioned in order to keep costs down. For example, if you assume that users only use 10% of their bandwidth on average, that means you can fit 10x as many people on a connection (or maybe 8x to account for peaks). This does mean that users should be discouraged from using their full bandwidth for long durations, otherwise the network operators can't overprovision as much and have to invest more in infrastructure.