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.
> here in NZ...all major ISPs have completely ditched their fair usage policies.
I'm quite fond of NZ and I've heard good things about the quality of your telecoms regulation, but ....
We manage traffic which may influence your broadband performance. This means we might have to pause, restrict, end or slow the performance of your service if it’s necessary for us to protect our networks or manage traffic over our networks. See clause 6.6 of our General Terms for more details.
and
You need to use our services fairly – we’ve set out our rules on this at clause 2.6 of our General Terms.
and
Fair use by you: You must use our services fairly. This means you agree to use them in a way that’s not overly excessive or unreasonable. This policy is based on how most people use the service and helps us make sure everyone using it gets to enjoy it. If we, acting reasonably and in good faith, believe your use is excessive and unreasonable, we might need to restrict the service or stop providing it to you.
All from Spark NZ's conditions[1][2] for their "unlimited data" fibre product[3].
Okay, so perhaps 'all' was a little optimistic. Spark is the old government monopoly, once called 'Telecom'. As such, they have inherited a huge base of users who don't pay any attention to which ISP they are using, or don't even know what an ISP is. As such, they're basically non-competitive.
There's rarely any benefit to using them compared to the competition - they are more expensive and refuse to join free internet exchanges, so Spark users frequently experience bad routing to services which refuse to pay money to Spark to peer.
What I can tell you, though, is that I have never once heard of Spark warning/booting a user for excessive usage, and I have my ears to the ground at various NZ tech forums.
If you are on an Uncapped or Unlimited Plan, the total amount of data you can upload or download is unlimited. We may use traffic prioritisation policies for these Plans to protect our Network and improve the overall performance amongst our customers.
(This is the Vocus group, including 2degrees, Slingshot, Flip, 2talk and Stuff brands)
Our policy is to provide you with the best broadband experience possible, so we won’t slow down or throttle your connection.
One New Zealand does not have a fair use policy for One New Zealand Fibre, HFC, VDSL or ADSL broadband
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.
What is ridiculous to me is that in 2023 we have someone on a techie forum who actually believes in the unlimited fairy.
Go read the small-print of your "unlimited" contract. Especially any sections entitled "acceptable use policy","fair use policy" or similar.
"unlimited" only means two things : traffic shaping and rate limiting.