It's the same problem in the UK. You're either screwed with a cap or you're screwed with traffic shaping and speed throttling - and traffic shaping isn't an option if you do online gaming since it fucks with your connection to the game servers. Also out in the country all internet packages come with complementary crappy BT-line speeds, meaning you're lucky if you can get upto 6-8mbit, because that's as fast as it's ever going to get.
The best internet package a friend of mine could get in his new house out in the woods in the northeast was a package with 80gb peak useage (peak = 8am-8pm) and no off-peak useage cap, for 50 quid, with a speed of 6-8mbit tops.
In comparison I live in the Netherlands, also out in the country, and I have unlimited 20mbit internet with no traffic shaping or throttling for 50 euro's. Actually it's less than that as the 50 euro package also includes digital cable tv and phone.
We're living in the age of online gaming, digital distribution, video streaming and we're quickly headed towards the point where everything we used to do by snail mail and phone can be done online, and in some cases is even encouraged to be done that way.
After 10+ years of these ideas developing unhindered you really can't just force people back into the digital stone age, it just doesn't work. From the ISP's perspective it's not even about moderating people's useage, it's about greed, plain and simple. They've figured out that now that we're so dependant on the internet and most of us take stuff that uses a lot of bandwidth (like video streaming, gaming and digital distributation) for granted, they can charge us more for the same service and most of us will end up paying it, because we don't want to go back to where we were before.
Ofcourse making this step only works once you've eliminated most of the competition, so that when you drop the bomb on people they have nowhere else to go. This is why so many ISP's are trying to consolidate by merging and/or buying up smaller ISPs. Once they control the majority of a country's network traffic, especially when they also own the lines that smaller independant ISPs that are still in business depend on... well, when that happens they can charge us whatever they want, limit us in any way they want (fair useage policy my ass, more like 'how can we squeeze more people onto the same bandwidth and give them less than what they're paying for' policy) and any real choice will just be a nice shiny illusion...
