Hi,

Internet service providers often have data limits, usually per month. Is this hurting Internet commerce? Is this putting the brakes a little bit on the economy? Is this hurting the online gaming industry?

Are you referring to downloading games/DLC?

My backup service can use more than 2gb per day. On a busy day I can send tens of gigs upstream and the same downstream just with working over vpn for work, downloading big data files, connecting to remote rdp servers and streaming YouTube videos.

I'm not limited in data sent or received per day or month nor are most UK isps any more.

Some isps throttle, slowing you down a bit if you are in the high percent of users that week, but that's about it. Here, data limits are for mobile data, and you can get that unlimited too if you shop around very cheap...

America has always been behind with Internet connections which is sad considering they created it :)

Unlimited home DSL is new in Austrialia - most plans cap your speed after you use 100-500GB in a month.
Usually the reduced speed is still good enough for playing games though - e.g. 1Mbps - so these caps mostly impact the feasibility of streaming services like netflix.
On that note, netflix has secured a deal witg my ISP, where netflix content won't count towards your quota, which is a huge selling point now. They also already do this for Steam too.

I had a friend in NZ who until recently, was only allowed 20GB per month, and was charged $1/GB if he went over that cap.
This definitely impacted his purchases - almost ensuring he wouldn't buy more than one game per month.

2GB is the standard limit imposed by ISPs in the USA, some have gone beyond 2GB.
...
Then another question is why would you be gaming on your wireless plan when you can use your faster cable/DSL connections at home/office?

2GB!!?
Oh...
You're talking about mobile - I assumed the OP was talking about data caps on residential conncections.

I get 2.3GB per month on my mobile, and excess usage is charged at $53.25 per GB!!

2GB is the standard limit imposed by ISPs in the USA, some have gone beyond 2GB

Wait, what? Even my cellphone provider offers more than that...

Take Comcast, which has a 300 GB/month cap, and even then they've suspended that cap indefinitely due to customer complaints.

(300 GB/month is just under 1 MB/s, and in practice I can download 4-6 MB/s, provided the server at the other end is willing to accommodate that sort of bandwidth).

Mobile: 2GiB per month is still the procedure in Italy, which is simply a joke.

Residential connection: usually there is no data caps limit (some ISP apply a 250GB data limit - or similar - per month). I remember on month I downloaded twice (don't ask me!) my entire Steam library, which was something about 1/2 TiB. Never received anything from my ISP.

However, in my country connection speed, quality and even existence is in a non-homogeneous state, like spots on a leopard skin (sorry dunno the English idiom here): some cities (better: some part of some cities) have Fiber-to-home or fiber-to street connections running at 30-60-100-250-300 Mbps, while others still have 6-8-fake20 Mbps ADSL connections. Other part of the countries they tried WiMax (without a great success) and in other parts there is no wired nor wireless connection at all (even when wired infrastructures are perfectly ready for consumers!)

I live in NZ and until a couple years ago we (4 internet users) had a hard data cap of 60GB/month - for all of us combined - and were charged $1/GB or so extra over the limit (like Hodgman said above). It was hell, we almost always went over the limit and it was pretty much impossible to do anything other than browsing and downloading maybe 1 medium sized file per day.

We then moved to a different provider which offered (I believe) 100GB/month, which was easier, but with the catch that if you went over the limit, your speed was throttled down to sub-dialup speeds (we're talking about a few hundred bytes per second with regular interruptions every few minutes). This was easier to manage, but was a real pain in the ass every time we did go overcap, and even that was realistically not enough to download large files on a regular basis.

Finally we upgraded to 500GB/month and since then we haven't gone over the limit, settling on a total average of about 8-9GB a day with occasional spikes, which I find pretty reasonable (about 2GB/day each). Though one month we came really, really close to the data cap limit; still not sure what actually happened then

Data caps suck.

Unlimited home DSL is new in Austrialia - most plans cap your speed after you use 100-500GB in a month.
Usually the reduced speed is still good enough for playing games though - e.g. 1Mbps - so these caps mostly impact the feasibility of streaming services like netflix.
On that note, netflix has secured a deal witg my ISP, where netflix content won't count towards your quota, which is a huge selling point now. They also already do this for Steam too.

I had a friend in NZ who until recently, was only allowed 20GB per month, and was charged $1/GB if he went over that cap.
This definitely impacted his purchases - almost ensuring he wouldn't buy more than one game per month.

2GB is the standard limit imposed by ISPs in the USA, some have gone beyond 2GB.
...
Then another question is why would you be gaming on your wireless plan when you can use your faster cable/DSL connections at home/office?

2GB!!?
Oh...
You're talking about mobile - I assumed the OP was talking about data caps on residential conncections.

I get 2.3GB per month on my mobile, and excess usage is charged at $53.25 per GB!!

Oh I must've have misread the OP. Data limit is usually something that mobile users are concerned of, not residential connections.

But still, largest consumers are video streaming, not gaming, even if you gamed 24 hours a day.

On my mobile I have 3GB per month, and I never even come close.

On the landline there is no data cap, but the speed sucks if I want to download larger stuff

Oh I must've have misread the OP. Data limit is usually something that mobile users are concerned of, not residential connections.

We have data caps on some residential connections over here (South Africa): one can get both capped and uncapped connections, and at various speeds--and at various prices, I believe. If I'm not much mistaken, where I'm staying we recently switched to a faster, capped connection (albeit with a cap high enough that we're not much bothered by it) from a slower, uncapped connection with a minimal increase in price. We could probably get an uncapped connection at this line speed, but that, I think, would likely cost rather more.

Unlimited home DSL is new in Austrialia - most plans cap your speed after you use 100-500GB in a month.
Usually the reduced speed is still good enough for playing games though - e.g. 1Mbps - so these caps mostly impact the feasibility of streaming services like netflix.
On that note, netflix has secured a deal witg my ISP, where netflix content won't count towards your quota, which is a huge selling point now. They also already do this for Steam too.

I had a friend in NZ who until recently, was only allowed 20GB per month, and was charged $1/GB if he went over that cap.
This definitely impacted his purchases - almost ensuring he wouldn't buy more than one game per month.

2GB is the standard limit imposed by ISPs in the USA, some have gone beyond 2GB.
...
Then another question is why would you be gaming on your wireless plan when you can use your faster cable/DSL connections at home/office?

2GB!!?
Oh...
You're talking about mobile - I assumed the OP was talking about data caps on residential conncections.

I get 2.3GB per month on my mobile, and excess usage is charged at $53.25 per GB!!

Oh I must've have misread the OP. Data limit is usually something that mobile users are concerned of, not residential connections.

But still, largest consumers are video streaming, not gaming, even if you gamed 24 hours a day.

It depends, while games don't often require a lot while playing digital distribution can get pretty big.

I got final fantasy 13 on steam and iirc it was around 50GB download, took me less than 30mins, could easily take days for others, or months for someone who has caps.