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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I am in Canada and the prices seemed a bit high on this website. Here is the math for my situation:

I use Freedom Mobile, an urban focused discount mobile service, formerly known as Wind Mobile: http://www.freedommobile.ca/plans-and-devices/plans

I get 9GB for $60/month, so that works out to 150MB/$ if I am at full usage.

Realistically I am average about 2GB/month so my real costs are 33MB/$.

The average website is 2.552MB according to this website.

Thus at full usage (9GB/month) my costs are 1.7 cents CAD (1.25 cents USD) per average website (2.5MB).

At average usage (2GB/month) I am hitting 7.7 cents CAD (5.6 cents USD) per average website (2.5MB).

I may be getting a better than average deal in Canada.

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> I may be getting a better than average deal in Canada.

Yes you are.

There's nothing like Freedom Mobile where I live (Montreal). I'm paying $60/month for 2GB.

Similar situation in Germany. With Aldi Talk, you can get 1GB and 300 texts/minutes for 8€. When valuing the text/talk component at 0, that still works out to 2.18 cents USD per 2.5MB, an order of magnitude less than the claimed 20ct.

Note that they picked the cheapest plan with at least 500MB, not the one with best value. Furthermore the largest ISP may not be the one with the best plans at the low end of the spectrum. That skews the data enormously.

> I may be getting a better than average deal in Canada.

Pretty much.

Freedom Mobile has limited coverage and is still rolling out LTE to the coverage it has. You can't really use it as a counter-example when it's a no-go for many Canadians. The site seems pretty close to what you can get if you shop around (it's exactly what I pay for example).

CRTC continues to do a bang up job of protecting Canadians!

> You can't really use it as a counter-example when it's a no-go for many Canadians.

It covers most of the main metropolitan areas.

How is that not still a no-go for many Canadians?

I even live in a "main metropolitan areas" and can't use it because I regularly travel out of "main metropolitan areas".

On the flip side, I lose coverage incredibly often with Freedom Mobile. Basements, but also random parts of ground-level buildings, are off-limits. To be fair, their coverage map doesn't flat out lie anymore, so they are improving.

> I get 9GB for $60/month, so that works out to 150MB/$ if I am at full usage.

But that $60 isn't just for the data, is it ? The same plan without data but with voice/text isn't $0.

I have unlimited text and unlimited calling to Canada and the US and when I am in the US I get 1GB of data, and 2400 calling minutes.

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