In Finland the average amount of data transferred per SIM card is 17.3GB/month

(side rant: in the following ten years, the tech giants sweeped in, competed, provided a better service, with better cross-platform support, for zero dollar immediate cost to the end customer -- gained a massive following (think whatsapp), and are now vilified for their "monopoly" and the "harm" it has caused.)

To want it perhaps not, but do you see people do this around you? I've seen more people gaming (laptop and mouse) on a train than people watching streaming video on the train. There have been more people that watched videos but when they pause for the conductor it's virtually always VLC or WMP, revealing that it's pre-downloaded. (I know VLC can do streaming but I'd have seen buffering here and there and they're much more likely to use the service's own client because of DRM.)

So while I don't say it's weird to have that desire (it would certainly be easier not to have to plan this ahead), yes, it is unusual in the Netherlands. And now that I live in Germany I'd say it's not just unusual but impossible, given their mobile data network coverage.

In rural areas the ADSL prices started climbing up a few years ago and most moved to cellular (60 euros for 21Mbps ADSL vs 25 euros for 50Mbps 4G). As of recent fiber connections are getting good in rural areas as well, so people are switching to fiber (40 euros for 100/100Mbps, 60 euros for 1000/1000Mbps). People who have both 4G router + fiber are quite rare.

In my experience some channels on 4G are quite ossified and during peak times you might even get a better throughput on 3G.

I have two such SIMs, one for the home router (because it's cheaper and faster than FTTC) and another for my phone.

Usage varies, but on a busy month the home SIM will see 100-300 GB, mostly for Netflix. The phone SIM sees about 10-30 GB.

Speed varies by time of day, but at peak it's 90 Mbit/s down, 20 Mbit/s up. At the slowest times of day it drops to about 8 Mbit/s down. The phone is faster than the router, so I've occasionally switched to using the phone to download something large.

Last time I checked, there was technically a cap on the monthly data of 3 TB. For a while they also limited tethering to 30 MB, i.e. using the phone as a wifi hotspot, and then (if they detected it) you could theoretically be charged a lot for tethered data over that cap. But they officially removed that restriction a few years ago.

The links are a bit unreliable. But the FTTC connection I had before was more unreliable, and more than twice the price. The FTTC connection before that was nearly three times the price (gouging - it started out cheaper than quietly kept increasing a lot). And if I move home, I can take my link with me now, instead of being tied into a 12 month contract at a fixed location.

Looking at my mobile data usage (which hasn't been reset since August), the top apps are 5 GB YouTube, 3 GB iOS system services (mainly document sync), 2.5 GB tethering, 1 GB photos app, 1.5 GB Twitter, 800 MB LINE messenger, 800 MB App Store, 600 MB music, 500 MB Safari, 500 MB Instagram, 350 MB Podcasts, etc etc