Just a few quick numbers for you from Australia, where you can't get an account without caps. Largely because Telstra own the wires, and partly because we're a long way from anywhere else and need big undersea pipes. Typical caps range from 5GB up to 25GB, though you can get more if you want to pay (a lot) for it.
Needless to say, those on small caps can't use data-hungry services. When the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, local non-commercial free-to-air TV) started their online TV service, they plastered it with warnings for those on smaller caps. Bigpond (Telstra's retail arm) is the largest ISP in the country, and they still sell a 256KB/12GB connection for AU$60/month.
It gets worse.
If you don't get the "Liberty" plan with "12GB then we slow you down", you get hit with HUGE excess fees of 15c/MB. That's $150/GB. A couple of other ISPs pull a similar trick, but most will just slow you down to dialup speed for the rest of the month, or offer extra data blocks for purchase at $1-2/GB.
With any luck, we'll get a slightly better deal if Telstra don't hold all the cards with the new FTTH network.
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