When I got internet cable in late 2002, it was 1 Mbps.
Within a short time, they upped the speed to 4 Mbps.
A few years later, it was upped to 12 Mbps for the ‘preferred’ tier. They also added a couple of faster and slower tiers.
Next increase a few years later was to 18 Mbps for ‘preferred’. At this level, one had to upgrade the modem to benefit from the speed. The older DOCSIS 2 was too slow. I upgraded to the DOCSIS 3.0.
Then the speed increased to 20 Mpbs.
About 18 months ago now, they increased again to 50 Mpbs for the ‘preferred’ tier.
Of course, about 3-6 months prior to each speed increase, they also upped the tier price $3 to $5 dollars.
In 2003, the ‘preferred’ tier was about $37/month. Next month (new price increase), it will be about $70/month.
The problem for my small town (14k pop) is the only competitors are slow/expensive DSL (about 10 Mbps max) or 3g Mobile or satellite.
Cable, for the price vs service is still the best value.
My download/upload increased from 250 Gb/month to 350 Gb/month. I can stream 3 sports events and a Netflix/Amazon Prime movie without any buffering. All that barely moves the content meter. I occasionally reach 80 to 100 Gb downloads/uploads per month.
Thanks, corrupt county commission!
So we are stuck with DSL at 5mbps which is at least cheap ($20 month) and has no caps.