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Comment by spike021 | Hacker News Reader

Mobile data is still fairly expensive, honestly.

It is. Back in 2009 in France there used to be 3 major networks and they'd charge insane prices up to $80ish a month for unlimited 3G. Then Free Mobile came and announced a $24 (19.99€) a month for ever unlimited, virtually the next day all those other operators created a "low cost" version of their plan at basically 19.99€ a month for unlimited phone/text/data ... What a coincidence.. nowadays it's still the same price, except it's 4G LTE.

Free Mobile almost had plans to buy T-Mobile[1], that would have been awesome...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/frances-iliad-dropping-plan-to-...

Yeah, thanks Free.

I'm now rocking an unlimited calls and texts with 20GB 4G data plan on SFR for 12 € / month. Without Free, I'm pretty sure that plan would cost me around 100 €.

T-Mobile “Unlimited” doesn’t throttle you until you hit upwards of 50GB in a month in the States, and my understanding is that mobile data is very inexpensive in Europe.

50 gigs is nothing unless you're only using it for email and website browsing.

I’m not sure what to do with your anectodal hyperbole except counter with other anectdotal hyperbole and say that 50gigs/month is more than enough for me under normal circumstances.

Granted I don’t watch a ton of streaming video, but I do work mostly online and am on multi party video conference for multiple hours per week.

What else are you doing at a restaurant or coffee shop?

50 gigabytes is enough to stream more 2 hour movies in high definition than anyone would care to watch in a single month. We are talking mobile data here, not FTTH or something. We're talking about activity you'll be doing on your phone or, at best, tablet.

Here in Canada, I'm paying 35$ for 512MB. I get can another 512MB for only 10$/month.

But there's totally no price fixing...

Is this typical pricing for N. America or does it depend quite a lot on where you live?

Typical. There used to be a cheaper alternative (Public Mobile), but they got bought and killed by one of the four giants. So now there is nothing cheaper.

This is certainly true for my province (Quebec), but the rest of Canada has the same (lack of) players, so I expect they have the same issues.

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