When a movie subscription says unlimited movies, we know they're not suggesting that they can break the laws of time, just that they won't turn you away from a screening. It's pretty normal language, used to communicate no additional limit, which is relevant when compared to cell phone data plans (which are actually, in my opinion, fraudulent) that shunt you to a lower tier after a certain amount of usage.
I do wish it was a word that had to be completely dropped from marketing/adverting.
For example there is not unlimited storage, hell the visible universe has a storage limit. There is not unlimited upload and download speed, and what if when you start using more space they started exponentially slowing the speed you could access the storage? Unlimited CPU time in processing your request? Unlimited execution slots to process your request? Unlimited queue size when processing your requests.
Hence everything turns into the mess of assumptions.
Yes, indeed, most relevant in this case probably "time" and "bandwidth", put together, even if you saturate the line for a month, they won't throttle you, so for all intents and purposes, the "data cap" is unlimited (or more precise; there is no data cap).
Nobody has turned the moon into a hard drive yet.
I doubt they have those pipes, at least if every of their customers (or a sufficiently large amount) would actually make use of that.
Second question would be, how long they would allow you to utilize your broadband 24/7 at max capacity without canceling your subscription. Which leads back to the point the person I replied to was making: If you truly make use of what is promised, they cancel you. Hence it is not a faithful offer in the first place.
Residential network access is oversold as everything else.
The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use.
But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.
Back in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
That sort of horrible abuse only happens in areas where some provider has strict monopoly, but that’s an aberration and with Starlink’s availability there’s an upper bound nowadays.
Not important here because backblaze only has to match the storage of your single device. Plus some extra versions but one year multiplied by upload speed is also a tractable amount.
Of course, in countries where the internet isn't so developed as in other parts of the world, this might make sense, but modern countries don't tend to do that, at least in my experience.
My parents have gotten hit by this. Dad was downloading huge video files at one point on his WiFi and his ISP silently throttled him.
A common term is "data cap": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cap
