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Comment by andreyf | Hacker News Reader

The most population-dense of the 50 US states is New Jersey. Taiwan seems to have roughly double the density: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+density+new...

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For that same twenty bucks you can get uncapped and unlimited 4G in Finland. Finland has 1/25 the population density of New Jersey. What was your point again?

Unlimited LTE through T-Mo, including unlimited talk and text, is $70 including taxes. The closest DNA plan seems to be 35 euros ($43): https://www.dna.fi/documents/753910/853456/DNA_Liittymahinna.... But median household income in the U.S. is 50% higher than in Finland. Adjusted for that,[1] the U.S. price is about $47.

[1] Cell service isn't like an iPhone, where it's made in China wherever you buy it. U.S. cellular providers pay U.S. rents for tower sites and U.S. salaries for the skilled labor to install and maintain them.

You misread the price list, that's not the cheapest unlimited text, talk and data plan from DNA.

Anyway the cheapest list price for unlimited text, talk and data is from Globetel at 22,85€. https://globetel.fi/liittymät

However, nobody pays list prices, there are always specials as the cell phone companies battle each other for market share. The cheapest offer for unlimited and uncapped 4G is currently 2,90€ per month.

I didn't pick the cheapest plan, but the closest. There is a cheaper DNA plan but that's limited to 50 mbits, while T-Mo's service is not bandwidth limited. Also, Globetel seems to be what we'd call, in the U.S., an MVNO (it uses Telia's network). There are U.S. MVNOs with cheaper prices too.

Move the goalposts much?

What point are you trying to make, other than picking random plans?

The exercise here isn't finding a good cell plan, it's comparing service in different countries. Pointing to discounts or to MVNOs that may have service limitations makes it hard to draw a fair comparison.

If the point is comparing service in different countries then you can't just pick a single high-end plan and say these things are equal.

I will concede that including discounts make things tricky, even if they are an integral part of the market, but by what measure should MVNOs be overlooked? Unlike in the US, MVNOs in other countries generally have the same access to the network as the MVO service arm.

The fact remains that in Finland you can get a real uncapped and unlimited 4G plan for about twenty bucks. Everything unlimited for under thirty. And capped 4G plans for under ten bucks.

By what measure does the US come even close?

EDIT: for clarification the above prices are all list prices from MVOs, with the exception of the everything unlimited which is from an MVNO. The equivalent MVO plans are a few euro more.

My point was that Taiwan has about 20x the population density of the US. The higher a population density, the cheaper it is to deliver broadband per capita.

And what's your point? Are you saying that population density is not correlated with cost of broadband infrastructure per capita because there exists an outlier?

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