All data plans should be unlimited. You should pay for speed. They spend the exact same amount of money if you spend 1 MB per month or 1 trillion petabytes. What matters is the amount of bandwidth being used at the same time.

They also should advertise the minimum speeds only. This is what should happen if you/we had decent regulations. Population density is their goddamn problem to fix. Create a better infrastructure, FFS.

I still can't believe that the population hasn't murdered those that allowed carriers to sell "data quantities", as if it was some kind of finit resource, like oil. To me, it's insane. You don't have a bag of data that needs to be managed otherwise it ends.

What would happen is that carriers would be what they should be: Dumb pipes competing on the best infrastructure and consumer support.

As it stands, the strategy is to find a balance so users keep being stupid, advertise higher internet speeds that may or mar not happen so you can bur through your data cap faster, push their services that won't count through that cap, sell you more data. It's just insane and really taking everyone for fools.