You have to look at the big picture. The caps will increase along with usage and speed. Data caps on average have been increased significantly over the past several years. Just a few years ago 10GB of cellular data cost a small fortune. Now it's pretty common. Yes, there were more "unlimited" plans initially, but this only worked because even those unlimited customers used a lot less data on average than today (e.g. monthly cellular data usage just 5 years ago was about 450MB on average, today it's around 2GB). It is also likely that we will see more service-specific billing in the future (along the lines of T-Mobile's video "binge" feature).
I'm not talking about simple online games, but cloud gaming (i.e. the actual game runs on a high-performance server somewhere in the cloud, and the phone app just streams the video and sends the player's controller actions). This requires a very fast feedback loop. There will probably be many more use cases that we can't predict yet. Just look at how mobile data use has changed over the last decade.
I am looking at the big picture. And I don't see cloud gaming coming to mobile platforms in the sense that you're predicting. I can see data caps rise, or not. Considering we have continued trending away from that it will take more than 5g tech (IMO) to change that trend.
I would argue that mobile data usage has been very predictable over the last decade. As speeds increased, consumption increased, and telcos reacted by finding new ways to make that money. There isn't a whole lot that incentivizes these folks to give us an all you can eat buffet and, in some countries, even wired internet connection has gone in the direction of data caps. My point is, at some point, you get diminishing returns, and I feel we are at that point, personally.
Data prices also haven't really changed significantly at all over the last few years. People are still paying pretty damn near what they were before, they just don't have the price of their phone baked in anymore. Telcos have also realized that people like paying for data pools rather than individual data lines. I keep a pretty close eye on data prices and who had the most bag for their buck. The best prices on data in recent years have come from adding lines to existing accounts (and the price here isn't even a better price on data, rather a better price per line accessing that data). Again, telcos have realized that getting you to pay an extra $10-20 per line to share the data you're already paying for is the way to go in today's market. Just about the only "clear winner" is the guy who wants a bottom of the barrel data plan. They got rid of the 200mb ridiculous plans because they realized that they were just "cost of owning a smartphone" plan and people hating them; you were paying for a data package because you were forced to, not because you were actually using data. These plans were replaced with 1-3gb plans for (roughly) the same price, so there is indeed value added there.
Anyway, agree to disagree. A world with unlimited data and cloud gaming sounds great to me. It's just not something I'm counting on. Without government intervention we are likely to continue to see caps and/or huge packages that are justified by the telcos by pointing to all of those tower upgrade and maintenance costs they have to dump into their network to get 5g running. In short, from a consumer standpoint, I think there are better things that can be done to a network that don't include 5g data.
