It's time to wrap up Evil Week, and what better way than by pitting two of the most evil industries against each other. Today, we're flipping our usual script upside down to find out who's worse: cell carriers or cable companies.

This post is part of our Evil Week series at Lifehacker, where we look at the dark side of getting things done. Sometimes evil is justified, and other times, knowing evil means knowing how to beat it. Want more? Check out our evil week tag page.

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The Contenders

By any reasonable metric, most people are not happy with their cell carrier or cable company. The latter frequently tops the charts for least trustworthy companies, and cell carriers...well, just check the comments on any of our articles about them. Of course, the corporate world of internet providers is complex and many companies have their hands in both industries, so here's how we're breaking it down.

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Cell Carriers: In the U.S., there are four major carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Collectively, they account for over 405 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. (phones, tablets, and hotspots are each counted as separate "subscribers"). They're also host to dozens of virtual networks called MVNOs that rely on their networks behind the scenes.

In the U.S., there are four major carriers: Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Collectively, they account for over 405 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. (phones, tablets, and hotspots are each counted as separate "subscribers"). They're also host to dozens of virtual networks called MVNOs that rely on their networks behind the scenes. Cable Companies: For our purposes, "cable companies" is shorthand for companies that provide home broadband internet, as well as companies that provide cable television packages. In many areas of the country, these are one and the same. Comcast (which owns Xfinity), AT&T, Charter (which owns Time Warner Cable), and Verizon all fall into this category. As of 2014, Nearly a third of U.S. households have no choice in home internet provider, while another third can only choose between two providers.

We're not even going to pretend to cover every single area that these companies aggravate their customers because it would take weeks to cover it all, but we'll sure try.

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Data Caps and Throttling Make Both Groups a Pain to Use

Carriers and cable companies are both guilty of one of the most annoying billing practices: data caps. These caps charge higher prices to customers who use more data. Ostensibly, caps manage network congestion, but it's unclear (at best) if they actually help. Data caps affect a customer's average usage over a month, but they don't—and can't—target high-traffic periods or locations. In fact, Comcast's own internal customer service script even says that data caps aren't about congestion management, but rather about "fairness" in pricing. Of course, Comcast also says they're not caps, but "data usage plans." So, even though there's no real practical reason to limit your home internet usage, cable companies will find a way to charge you more because it's "fair."

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Data caps are such a huge problem that the FCC has received tens of thousands of complaints about them since mid-2015. Most of them, however, target home internet companies. Carriers have stricter data limits, but this makes slightly more sense given that wireless spectrum is a finite resource. If you run out of data on your phone, you can hop on a Wi-Fi network somewhere. However, if you run out of data on your home internet, you're a little screwed. Comcast and AT&T have raised their data caps to 1TB per month, after which you'll be charged extra for going over. 1TB is a more reasonable limit than they've had in the past (some were as low as 250GB), but even that can get tight if you have a family sharing one connection, streaming movies or downloading games. In most cases, the limit also doesn't change if you have a faster internet speed. Whether you have 1Mbps or 150Mbps, you get the same amount of data. This makes no sense. If you'd rather not worry about counting your gigabytes, AT&T will sell you an unlimited data upcharge for $30, while Comcast charges $50.

On the carrier side, things are a lot more confusing. You can get some unlimited plans, but they come with a lot of fine print. T-Mobile's One plan offers unlimited data, but if you try to tether you'll be throttled to 2G speeds, unless you pay $15 per 5GB of data per month. Sprint's similar plan comes with 5GB