Mobile data: Why India has the world's cheapest | Hacker News Reader

Mobile data: Why India has the world's cheapest

bbc.com

115 pointspseudolus144 comments

Here in the US, we recently moved into a new house (rural) and my broadband wasn't setup yet, so I needed a temporary solution to continue working from home.

So, I headed off to the mall to compare mobile AP plans. Literally every option was either mega expensive (think multiple hundreds of dollars per month for 100 GB or the price was right but the service area was crap).

A lot of the mobile data plans actually only apply to direct usage from your phone. Not when using it as an AP (tethering). Those all have separate bandwidth limits. The standard amount on most plans (that you also have to pay extra for) is around 10 gigabytes. And, I didn't even find a normal consumer plan from ATT / Verizon (the only carriers with good service here) that let you buy more than that. You have to buy a super expensive business plan.

So yeah, fuck US LTE data plans. Absolute garbage if you actually try to use it for any serious work from a PC.

It's not a data plan, but I'm using straight talk's $55 "unlimited" plan. Supposedly I'll get throttled or whatever after 50GB or so based on congestion, but I'm generally over 100GB just from tethering and I've never been throttled. Not sure what network they use, I think Verizon. Might be an option to consider if you haven't yet.

Good plans come up semi frequently, you just need to know where to look. I worked from an RV full time for 2 years using only cell plans and I was pretty happy with the plans I had. I still use my Verizon Grandfathered Unlimited plan for home internet and routinely use >100GB/month for $80/month. That plus an AT&T connected car plan with unlimited data for $25/month and I am set. I spent a lot of time following https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/ before pulling the trigger on plans.

It's pretty crazy to think I've been using the same data plan for well over a decade but that Verizon grandfathered unlimited really is worth it. Some months I don't use much but others I can go well into the hundreds and hundreds of GB without breaking a sweat.

I know T-mobile has some coverage issues but their phone plan has free phone tethering. I think its capped at 3G speed but works great for typical laptop usage.

> Absolute garbage if you actually try to use it for any serious work from a PC.

I beg to differ - I have 2 hotspots from Verizon (15GB each -> 30GB total/month) and they support my full-time work as a remote developer. I have to avoid watching HD video, but that's effectively the only restriction I have.

My folks were nearly burned out in the Paradise Camp Fire (there's no visible structures around them). They went with a satellite-only broadband provider because it would've taken another 1-2 months from now to get POTS telephone restored (they would be the only customer on the street).

> A lot of the mobile data plans actually only apply to direct usage from your phone. Not when using it as an AP (tethering).

Not to take away from the larger point about US data plans, which is generally true.

But the fundamental market philosophy of the US is to exploit individuals' laziness. If you're unwilling to do the basic modern necessity of taking control of your phone, then you perfectly fit the profile to be their victim. If you're just walking into a carrier store/kiosk and asking them what they overtly market, you basically have "$$$" written on your forehead.

Practically - if I needed an LTE connection, I'd setup a fixed antenna aimed at a Sprint tower on a Clearwire-settlement plan, look into buying a grandfathered Mobley device on eBay, or accept a slightly lower speed for a consumer "unlimited data" plan (eg $55/mo for 3Mbps at Cricket).

I'm really glad you made this comment because you're actually totally right. I am a very competent developer. I should just figure out how to get tethering setup outside their mobile hotspot limits so it looks like phone data.

Looks like I should be able to do it with this from my Apple device: https://github.com/rickyzhang82/tethering/wiki

I have 2 phones, one on Sprint's Free year plan - which I have yet to see throttle, even with tethering.

My other phone is in Mint SIM, which costs $20/mo for 8gb of LTE and works great, and tethering is shared with regular data.

How is 8GB/mo LTE a good deal? Theoretically you should be able to use your allowance in minutes (or it's not really LTE)

Can the ISP detect if you're using it as an AP?

If you use the stock ROM then they probably can. A fey years ago the carriers would put proprietary hotspot apps on your phone which would integrate with their billing system, but if you switched to another ROM you could just use the built-in Android hotspot option and it would work just fine.

With an AOSP ROM like LineageOS they can't detect it from the phone itself, but there are still some differences in the packets that a phone would send vs the packets a computer would send (you can Google about how to hide tethering on T-Mobile and find some discussion on that); it's not very hard to change your settings to avoid that method of detection.

This probably refers to TTL, which can be easily changed to disguise the 'hop' from your device to your phone... but Deep Packet Inspection is apparently commonly used nowadays too. To get around that you need to be encrypting with a VPN or similar setup.

This is my simplistic understanding of the state of play based on the last time I looked into it but as mentioned above it's easy to Google.

How do you fix the TTL trick?

on the AP (phone):

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j TTL --ttl-set 65

You will need TTL target built into the kernel of the ROM you are using. LineageOS is unwilling to do it officially, so I build my own with it enabled.

It's a good idea to only use ipv4 when doing this. A few services are detected on TMUS, so for those VPN. Sprint doesn't seem to care, but they have a patent on TTL detection too from around 10 years ago. I normally do not VPN, but I do use my own DNS since I don't like carrier hijacking.

You set the default TTL in your OS to +=1.

If you buy an unlocked phone, you get Android tethering. Only buying/leasing a phone from a carrier (bad idea as usual) risks a custom hotspot app since maybe Lollipop or Marshmallow?

Look up 'dun_tether_required'.

Set that option and your carrier can't tell if you're tethering. It doesn't require root and works on every phone I've tried it on.

Not if you use a VPN, from my experience.

Very ISP dependent: both Verizon and T-Mobile detect using TTL. They also have a list of services which will count towards hotspot data.

For Sprint, everything is old and weird... so they just look at ports like it is 12 years ago. (OpenVPN's default port is bad, 443 is good though)

I used around a terabyte one month on T-Mobile's unlimited plan. I think at the time I paid around $90.

Any reason you didn't consider Google Fi? I've been pretty happy with it.

Google Fi a virtual operator using T Mobile towers. T Mobile's coverage is excellent in cities, but pretty bad in rural areas.

It switches between Sprint and T-Mobile, not sure if that makes a difference, I guess it depends where you are

Sprint is really bad outside cities too. Sprint and T-Mobile are the two worst operators if you're concerned about signal quality outside metro areas.

Historically T-Mobile was terrible. They now have native roaming on US Cellular and band 12 (700mhz) and band 71 (600mhz) lowband coverage. This covered a lot of the gaps.

Sprint is weird, since they really only have halfassed voLTE they rely on a giant legacy CDMA network that should have been put out to pasture 5 years ago. But they do have the largest number of roaming agreements if all you care about is ability to call (and not have data). They do have fast data but it requires you to be in line of sight of a tower, not have walls or wet leaves in the way, and have a phone supporting HPUA so you can actually upload things.

AT&T's network has basically zero investment in recent years, unless in Georgia or a handful of other markets it's the worst of the 4. Poor spectrum planning, low capex, the only reason they are #2 is because they keep buying up companies with customers (shitty Mexican carriers and DirecTV).

Verizon still seems best (hardware, spectrum planning, roadmap, coverage), but no plans ideal for my needs. Poor for travel.

>Verizon still seems best (hardware, spectrum planning, roadmap, coverage), but no plans ideal for my needs. Poor for travel.

I use a Verizon reseller (Total Wireless); it works great and is pretty cheap for the US.

Travel is not a problem with Verizon: Verizon phones are all unlocked, and have SIM cards. Just buy a prepaid SIM card when you're out of the country and use that for data. It's generally much cheaper than any service in the US; on my recent trip in Europe, it cost me 15 Euros for a 3GB SIM card, and I don't think I used half of that in my 2 weeks there, even though I was using my phone extensively for navigation and more.

Get an overseas SIM card with the ability to roam to the USA.

Three UK will let you roam to the USA and is $8 per month. $8 is the total plan cost, and there is no supplement for roaming!

Individually, perhaps, but when you put them together, it closes quite a few gaps. In practice, when I switched to Fi, I got more coverage in places where AT&T's was really bad.

Google Fi can also do cellular over WiFi if your phone supports it.

I have a device with Sprint. If I run into an area where my primary T-Mobile phones don't get service, they'll do voWiFi using the Sprint connection.

Google Voice now supports data calling as well, so you can have same end result of WiFi calling even if your carrier or phone will not do voWiFi.

I don't see the appeal of Fi at all.

For me, the biggest appeal of Fi is that you pay the same data rates when travelling in other countries. The second biggest is the ability to have up to 5 data SIMs associated with the same account, with identical rates and no extra fees.

I don't pay for data in other countries. It's throttled unless I buy a day pass. For longer stays I usually buy a cheap local SIM and sign into Google Voice and DIGITS for free calling and number portability.

So you have data SIMs that share from the same pool? I use a few hundred GB's per month. How much would this cost on Fi? I currently have 4 unlimited SIM's, a extra voip number, and a low speed SIM with one of my line numbers copied. It costs about $160/mo. If I run into an area where I don't have service, I have a second provider that's also unlimited and costs $4/mo.

T-mobile's bad coverage reputation is undeserved today. They are easily on par with AT&T _IF_ your phone supports their 700MHz band.

My experience differs significantly from yours, having moved from att to T-Mobile in the last 3 months.

Google Fi does not even qualify as an operator really. It is not a standard that any device can implement. It is only implemented by google's blob. You can use google-fi as a regular network if you hardcode to one operator, but the switching stuff needs a blob.

It's not exactly cheap at $10/Gb.

> The BBC report, citing a UK-based price comparison site, said that 1 gigabyte (GB) of mobile data cost $0.26 in India (£0.20), compared with $12.37 in the US, $6.66 in the UK, and a global average of $8.53.

According to OECD, the Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) for India is 17.729 , UK is 0.691 and US is 1.0 [0]. That's a huge difference and hence, ignoring the purchasing power will not give you a full picture about the "cost".

[0] https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...

Mobile telecom prices are just a pure licence to print money. The cost base (infrastructure and regulatory costs) is insignificant and the asking price maxed out - depending on the market.

Prices could be mitigated by competition but usualy we have oligopoly, by regulators (EU and roaming charges) or by taxation (licences to operate).

I always laugh when similar company with similar shareholders charge 15 times more in one country then in another.

Digi Malaysia extending prepaid for 1 year 68 ringit 15$, dtac Thailand 1$. Both owned by Telenor.

I hate mobile companies as much as anyone else but that's like saying that once you're past the hard part of software development the rest is easy.

The bread and butter of mobile operators is infrastructure and spectrum licensing. FWIW I think there's a fair amount of competition, at least more than you see in the ISP space. Building towers is usually much more straightforward than trenching fiber/cable.

Towers are connected through fiber.

Mobile companies in general don't compete with each other at all and just continuously raise prices until too many customers starts leaving or regulators and politicians start to notice.

Depends on the company/tower. Quite a few use high gain RF links.

My local WISP uses AirFiber[1] for all their backhauls, mobile can be different but nothing is an absolute.

[1] https://www.ui.com/products/#airfiber

T-Mobile has some AirFiber deployed in west NJ and PA for connecting towers.

There are remote towers that actually have satellite backhaul. You can tell when you're on UMTS/HSPA or LTE and the latency is like 700ms. The companies are trying to eliminate them as they are costly to operate.

In many countries, mobile bandwidth licenses were auctioned for ridiculous sums, which were probably bid based on what they expected the market to be able to bear. That made the expected profit part of the cost.

There was a bit of a scandal back then because of the way the Dutch government handled that auction and tried to squeeze as much money as possible out of the various bidding companies.

True. But it is just the government trying to get a slice of a pie. regulatory cost.

It makes sense that the government wants to only hand out this extremely limited resource to organizations that will actually use it. And there is some sense that if someone pays a half a trillion dollars for the spectrum that they'll be highly motivated to use it to recover those costs, but in the end it basically guarantees that the service will be expensive because they have to make back that investment.

But the only other solution I can see is to have the government just pick a company and hand them the license, and that's effectively guaranteed to be breathtakingly corrupt since the incentives to cheat are overwhelming. At least with the market solution the money goes into the government's general fund instead of into the pockets of the party official in charge of making the decision.

> but in the end it basically guarantees that the service will be expensive because they have to make back that investment

Isn't it exactly the other way around? They bid high because they estimate that they will be able to make back the investment. The sole reason for making that investment is to sell it on to customers.

It works both ways. They bid high because they expect to be able to made back that investment, but having bid so high, they also need to meet that expectation, or they're in trouble.

Either way they're expecting to make that money back in a reasonable timeframe. Eventually the costs need to be passed onto the customers.

Gov can run the network and make all providers MVNO’s

Thats why gov’s should run national network and let MVNO’s just issue eSIM’s and purchase peering/international cables.

It’s a but like broadband and electricity deregulation in UK or NZ.

>Mobile telecom prices are just a pure licence to print money.The cost base (infrastructure and regulatory costs) is insignificant and the asking price maxed out - depending on the market.

The majority of cost aren't spectrum, ( as a few comment below suggested ) or Infrastructure, ( Payment made to Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, or ZTE ), but rental agreement for all those Base station.

It is not exactly license to print money like Casino, Oil industry. The telecom industry margin are generally quite thin.

Maybe the expensive part is spectrum -- it's pretty limited, and is usually sold at auction. So the cheap bandwidth (double meaning intended) in India is ultimately a reflection on the average customer not being able to afford much.

The customers don't literally participate in the auction, obviously, but the operators bid based on what they think customers will pay. It's like the representative democracy version of an auction.

That’s true, but the cell towers are probably going to be of a similiar cost in India vs US. Lower (because wages are lower) but similar because the actual equipment is going to be the same price.

PPP is only relevent for things that have different prices in different countries (housing, food, etc). There are many things that cost roughly the same wherever you are: oil, macbooks, cell towers, etc.

As a general rule, the easier something is to arbitrage, the less PPP matters. The cost of arbitrage includes transport costs, taxes, and depreciation schedules (vegetables would be cheaper in India vs US because they are hard to transport, for example).

Of course this is only relevent if the US companies aren’t making crazy margins (I don’t personally know, but I suspect it’s possible).

The cell tower cost is not similar at all. I also used to think that the actual telecom equipment was the biggest cost and then your statement would be true. But generally installation cost and raising a tower is many times more expensive than the equipment.

Digging down power and fiber to a tower is not cheap.

Is the bulk of cell tower cost going towards equipment? My understanding was that a significant chunk went towards labor/construction costs and land rent, both of which are probably much cheaper in India.

You are missing the core point - the income for an average person in India is significantly lower than the US or UK. Therefore, you can not directly compare prices of products across countries regardless of the costs of the product itself.

Some metrics to look at

GNI(PPP) Per Capita in Int$ : India - 6,980 / UK - 42,560 / USA - 60,200 [0]

GDP (nominal) per capita in US$ (World Bank) : India - 1,940 / UK - 39.720 / USA - 59,532 [1]

One of those countries, is not like the other two.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(PPP)...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Are you suggesting that someone would sell a product for a lower price than what it costs just because people are poor where he sells it? PPP isn’t magic and you have to understand why some products are cheaper in 3rd world countries and why some products are the same price or even more expensive.

It’s about arbitrage. Just quoting some PPP stat from wikipedia is irrelevent and missing the point.

Why do you think PPP is different in different places? It’s not some magic wand you can just wave around.

> Are you suggesting that someone would sell a product for a lower price than what it costs just because people are poor where he sells it?

Yes and it happens regularly. One example :

Apple Music - USA $9.99 per month, UK £9.99 per month, India 1.74 US$ / 1.32 GBP

However, This was not always true. Mobile data used to cost 5$ a GB. It was made possible by a company called Jio with a vision to provide internet for everyone. Then other companies followed their concept. Purchasing power alone didn't bring this change. India had expensive internet like all other countries.

This. I pay €35 for T-mobile unlimited. Cheap enough for me but not the average Indian citizen I'm sure. Companies can only price what the market can bear.

Exactly. Lower income = lower labor cost = lower consumer cost.

Who knows if that accounts for all of the difference, but excluding that factor makes the whole thing useless.

It's also a cultural thing. The consumers won't pay a huge amount. They are very used to negotiating for nearly everything and anything.

They may be used to it, but they also hate it.

Consumers would rather go to a big box store where they know they’ll pay an okay price all the time instead of a market where they’re expected to mentally calculate the actual value of every good and negotiate down to a magic number.

Even EBay couldn’t keep the auction concept alive.

Auctions (effectively what these negotiations are) are great for one thing: unique and expensive objects.

It’s a pain to have to spend hours a year negotiating every $50/month that goes out of my pocket. That’s a lot of unproductive hours against a machine with thousands of employees working against me.

When you say they, who are you talking about? Western or Indian consumers?

Auctions aren't the same as bargaining. Auctions have a lower price that is constantly going up. It just helps to reveal the max that a buyer will pay.

Both groups.

Bargaining is a waste of time if you have alternatives that don’t require it to get a good price.

Auctions has buyers that are willing to pay more up until a point. Negotiating at the market has a seller that is willing to pay less up until a point.

The same rules largely apply.

Isn't India data cheap because one person who owns one giant telecom decided he wanted data to be cheap in India? Similar to the original Google Fiber philosophy.

Ah, per other comments: Jio

That one person was Ambani, owner of Reliance Petro Chemicals, & started Jio mobile, funfact: mirror reflection of Jio is almost oiL.

Yup. Mobile data was a lot more expensive 2-3 years ago. Then one company started a massive race to the bottom.

See my above comment on why this is a fallacy. PPP isn’t magic, it only affects goods that are difficult to arbitrage.

This is why oil is the same price pretty much everywhere in the oil. Because if oil was cheaper (including taxes and transport) in one place, someone would buy it and sell it somewhere else.

When everyone is doing this, it equalizes the prices. This is because arbitrage drives up the price of cheaper oil and drives down the price of the expensive

Difficult to arbitrage? You just proved the opposite of your own argument.

Oil is the same price for many reasons (least of them being OPEC), but largely because of your point - there is a global market.

How exactly is the US or UK supposed to export cheap data from India?

The point is that the cell towers are going to be the same price regardless of location. So PPP isn’t a good justification for why data is cheaper in India. That is all I’m saying.

Labor cost is insignificant. More so the cost of building infrastructure - BTS towers.

And labor cost are significant when building the towers. The actual cost for the equipment is much smaller than the tower installation cost.

And how is building infrastructure not impacted by labor costs?

Lease, monitoring, insurance, real estate taxes, site maintenance.

From the report [1]:

Tower cost in India (40-60k$) due to low land rent cost. Tower in Latin America (120-180k$)

Tower in UK - 200-400k£ [2]

[1] http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9M...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/981f7084-c515-11e5-b3b1-7b2481276...

If anything that is supporting my argument. Yes, all of those costs are less in India. Why would that possibly be?

Because land lease and related cost are significantly lower in India. Not due to labor costs.

While it is cheapest there are many shady things that are going on. For example both Jio and BSNL automatically throttle your speed for porn and many other websites. BSNL outright bans the porn websites.

You forgot to mention the fact that BSNL injects malware and ads. And outrageously, they claim it is a feature! The way they do it by injecting javascript into your page that then does shitty pop-up scam ads (including ones that increase page counts for some pretty big e-com sites). Some of the pop-up/under ads then install malware of their own.

The entire company is run by morons.

Yes, can attest to that. I had a BSNL connection, which would always inject some JavaScript/etc stuff for Http sites. With HTTPS sites they could not do anything. But I got rid of the connection anyway.

Simple Google DNS servers or things like that easily circumvent those restrictions, at least on AirTel & Jio. BSNL is always I have seen as follower of other companies in prices & policies.

That is what I do but common folks have no idea what DNS is.

Another thing Reliance has done with me in past is to sell my billing data to a fake debt collection agency.

Throttling speed for porn isn't a bad thing. Porn is a waste of time and energy!

In that case, they must declare that they are going to throttle the speed.

But that is poor logic. My guess is 90% internet surfing is waste of time and energy. So..

Porn is banned on Jio mobile network (though due to court order).

The BBC didn't do their homework iiuc. Here is a plan here in Israel. Unlimited text and calls with 100GB data - 29nis which is about 0.1$! per 1GB...

https://golantelecom.co.il/web/

Overall, Israel is a very expensive country excluding mobile plans...

It looks like there is some catch. https://golantelecom.co.il/web/plans is the most deceptive plans page I have seen.

* There is no catch on the specific plan and a other similar plans by other operators. overall in Israel there are many plans or services that are X for the first 1-3 years and then will change. but some plans (such as the above) should be without those limits.

* Notice, that in the BBC article they suggest there is haggling involved in getting low prices. so we also don't get much information what limitations imposed.

Only if you use all of the 100 GB though.

Same goes for the suggested Indian plans and pretty much most plans those days.

From what I've read on the article above some plans have daily data-cap and you pay for a specific amount on data monthly.

no longer available because of putin's wars, but there was an unlimited data plan with 100mins calls included for yota.ru and comparable options from competitors, 380 rubles/month(~6usd) still working for those who purchased it before 2014(or something like that)

A lot of European countries have unlimited data for data SIMs (Finland, Austria, Estonia, France, Switzerland and many more). With such SIM cards you can completely replace your home internet. I used that for a while and downloaded 1TB+ a month for less than 20 Euro. That would put me to 2ct/Gigabyte which would be even cheaper than what is quoted here.

I think what matters more than the price for the gigabyte is what you get in service for that. I'm absolutely happy to pay 50 EUR or more a month if the service is good.

Russia also have mobile ISP that have "unlimited" internet and at some moments can provide 70Mbps. There is some obvioua shaping for torrents, but with VPN it's possible to go well over 1TB on $15 / month plan. There were actually bunch of such options in past, but only few remains.

In rural Austria internet over LTE has replaced a lot of DSL installations. So much that most ISPs now offer hybrid VDSL2+LTE connections with GRE tunnel bonding.

Not just in rural areas.

India's mobile data may be cheap, but it's also pretty poor. It may be 4G technology, but speeds are far below what's common in the UK / Europe. Last week in Delhi I was getting anywhere between a few kbps and ~2-3Mbps on Vodafone 4G.

I spend a lot of time in Delhi myself. My Airtel sim often gets 10-15mbps down nearly anywhere in the city.

Thanks, I'll try Airtel next time.

This is true. I'm crawling with 2 Mbps on Airtel for the past 3-4 months. Jio has always been at 0.8-0.9 Mbps. Vodafone has similar issues.

Indian 4G rarely gives the 40-50 Mbps or more that you can see in other countries

Isn't this just due to the sheer number of users in that area? India is an extremely densely populated country (in the cities at least), and as more and more people get access to cellphones it's just going to get worse. There's only so much bandwidth possible with the frequency bands being used.

> There's only so much bandwidth possible with the frequency bands being used.

Not really true. You can just have smaller cells - many more towers using lower power.

It just costs more to have smaller cells.

I worked on a piece of software that was meant to communicate over wireless and the test bench folks were getting horrendously bad numbers compared to the rest of us.

They were getting 50% packet loss and so the throughput was maybe a tenth of what we were hoping for. Streaming really hates high packet loss rates, unless you've built FEC into the protocol (and we hadn't)

Quite... I'd often see between 30% to 70% (and occasionally worse) packet loss... sometimes pinging 8.8.8.8 would take over 6000ms for a response!

In Delhi:

JIO 4mbps symetric

Vodafone: 8mbps down (but it was capped per month on a limit)

I got 60mbps down on the CMHK in Hong Kong.

So India does have cheap mobile services, but the quality of it isn't great.

There are service outages, issues with coverage, and there are serve limits on the data.

I used JIO and had an average about 4mbps speed. Also, there has been concerns about censoring sites. (see r/india.. they blocked reddit in the last week)

I paid about 199inr (~$3) and got 2gbs per day for a month.

2GB per day for $3 even at 4Mbps is like a dream to someone in the US where plans are more in the range of $45/month for 2GB per month. Speeds are better, but useless because you'll smack directly into the cap if you actually use it.

The lower speed in India is at least partially due to it being heavily used instead of sitting idle because people don't want to blow out their cap. IMHO this is more egalitarian. They aren't keeping the poors off of the system just so the elite can download their cat videos faster.

>2gb for a month

?! I'm paying about $43 for 8gb on the Verizon network. https://www.pagepluscellular.com/plans/

> They aren't keeping the poors off of the system just so the elite can download their cat videos faster.

They're oversubscribed. I'm not sure where this helps "the poors" to stay subscribed to the service.

Jeez, here I get 10GB for £5 ($6). To be fair I do get this price because they're also my ISP but it's not hard to find a similar deal. Speed at home is 57Mbps down, 15.6 up.

UK 4G speeds are generally not as great as most of Europe either from what I know.

3GB per day for 90 days for around 1,000 Rupees with Airtel. As a tourist Jio isn't an option, have to go pre-paid.

Not bad at all, blazing fast compared to most WiFi connections here in northern India (Himachal Pradesh).

Now if the power would stop cutting out... maybe in a few more years :)

A tangential point ... but power cuts in Himachal? I grew up in Himachal in the late 80s and 90s, and power cuts were extremely rare. Himachal was one of the few states that was power surplus and boasted of 100% electrification. Has this changed in recent years?

Mcleod Ganj may not have the infrastructure that the rest of Himachal does, I don't know. In the last two weeks here the power cuts out roughly 3 times per day, anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 hours, which is apparently pretty good compared to winter when weather can take power out for 24+ hours.

It's not even high season yet, I imagine it will only get worse with mass influx of people stressing the already shaky grid.

Indeed. I remember lots of micro-hydroelectric power plants. Not sure how well the power distribution infrastructure is maintained. Heck of a beautiful place.

How useful is 3GB for 90 days?

* per day

3GB per day, so up to 270GB over 90 days. How useful is 270 GB? ;)

It's per day, and so far has been useful enough to upgrade to Fedora 29. Updating OSX VM with Xcode on the other hand, that may take a while.

Otherwise, 3GB takes you a long way, certainly enough to load Slack and maybe check out HN. \s

That’s what I have. 1 GB a month. And it’s fine. Some months I don’t even use 300 MB. Just don’t watch videos and run an ad blocker.

Before Jio, different players held monopoly at different pockets and Jio flattened it. (Think BPL in Kerala, Airtel in metros, BSNL in rural areas, Orange in tier two cities). Because of this, when a provider increase prices, others will follow suit as everyone benefitted. So I assume the prices were high before Jio, and Jio did a correction.

Jio, will soon become a monopoly and as the article says, might jack up prices when they have the bigger slice of the pie. An acquisition of the second best then would seal the low price game and everything will go up then. Thats what Airtel was doing when they were number 1 a while back.

India is not as rich as developed economies, so the optimal price point for monopolists in general is lower (due to more people becoming unable to pay monopoly rents at lower prices).

When Jio was launched in 2016, Mukesh Ambani (Managing Director of Reliance Industries, parent company of Jio) quoted saying “Data is the new oil and we don’t need to import it”

Jio comes bundled with value added free services like JioTV, JioCinema, JioMagazine, JioMusic(JioSaavn now) and bunch of other apps.

India is a price sensitive market and hence Jio would keep prices lower for as long as possible to keep other players out. Jio is already posting profits.

They are in it for the long game. The bottomline is that prices may not go up anytime soon.

all of that sounds so scary. One corporation controlling what you watch, read and listen.

They’ve already shown troubling signs. When Jio was launched, senior executives, when asked about how they’ll increase revenues, said, “There’s something called as Deep Packet Inspection and the potential is enormous”[1]

Second, Jio frequently blocks VPN connections. Proactively and sometimes without reason even if there’s no government order. Sometimes, I’ve had to use techniques from blog posts about bypassing the great firewall of China to be able to connect to VPN services. Its not as ridiculous as the actual GFW but the signs are there.

Reliance is also engaged in a plethora of businesses, especially consumer facing ones and have shown increased desire to link it all together.

[1] https://in.reuters.com/article/reliance-telecoms-jio/from-bi...

Reddit has been banned on and off in Jio and Jio owned Hathway.

China Mobile Pakistan sells a 200 GB plan for ~100 USD. Not do cheap given that median white collar salary in Pakistan is $500.

How's Mobilink? When I roamed with T-Mobile there they seemed to be the one that my SIM locked onto. I heard they were good but expensive (but this was 2014)

Haven't been in the country in a while, but I don't expect anything remotely comparable from Jazz. The maximum I found was $15 for 50GB on a plan.

I live in Tanzania (moved from the US) and mobile data prices are also relatively cheap. I could get 4gb for 75 cents for 24 hours 11pm-5pm. Or I could get 1gb for 50 cents for 2 hours. The one I usually go for is 10gb for 7 USD for 7 days.

But because 4G is the only way to get internet, it actually becomes more expensive very quickly. I route all of my internet traffic through my phone or through my 4G mobile hotspot.

So I think the real reason that the data is cheaper is because 4G is the only way to get data, if your a consumer or a business. So the pricing reflects that.

Because in the first world we have fiber optics, this allows mobile companies to charge a ton of money per Gb, since no one is downloading large files with it anyways.

This is exactly what I miss after moving to US from India.

In 2012 the data in India was too much expensive, like a GB or two for a Dollar. Around 2017, It was About Two GB every day for 30 days for Two Dollars total. Amazing. 4G. Good coverage. Airtel. Here in US ATT gives me 3GB for a whole month, & extra $15 if I go over 3 for next 1 GB.

Infact from few days I am trying to find a cheaper data only prepaid pay-as-you-go Sim for my second phone.

Not sure where they're getting their data, but from anecdotal evidence, it seems off - in the UK I have something like 20 GB (not sure because never been anywhere near the limit) for £12 or so¹, so it's £0.6 per GB - a whole order of magnitude cheaper than quoted in the article.

[1] Technically less, because the £12 includes calls and SMS as well.

The article doesn't mention anything at all about technology or infrastructure. Are we really to believe that wireless data is orders of magnitude cheaper, purely because of price fixing in USA/UK? How much of the price difference can be explained by infrastructure, technology choices, labor, quality, etc?

Here in India I pay ~$2.50/mo for 60gb of mobile data and ~$50/mo for 875gb of 150mbps broadband.

It's one of the few things I feel blessed about while living in this country.

is it from Jio?

Population density is another important reason why the prices are cheap.

TLDR: Jio upset the status quo, for now.

I think the argument that Jio’s prices must necessarily go up is suspect. For one thing, the article does not present any reason this should be the case, other than prices being higher before Jio. But the other is that Jio’s business model is equivalent to Xiaomi’s. For Xiaomi, the phones are sold at a price that basically recovers costs, so they can make money off services. Jio is basically doing the same thing, only using its network instead of the hardware as a subscriber acquisition strategy.

It’s very possible that the strategy may not work, but if it does (and the article provides no evidence it won’t, in fact, it reveals that Jio is actually making more money per subscriber than the average telco), then there is no reason to believe prices will need to go up.

In an economy of very poor people it's possible that having dirt cheap prices leads to more profit overall. In economies where people have money it's guaranteed to go up because it's essentially leaving money on the table.

Which makes the article’s claim that prices will go up even more unlikely.

This is a stupid comparison. How can BBC claim with a straight face that India has the world's cheapest mobile data when access is sold by the gigabyte and other countries have truly unlimited mobile data?

Faster access is sold by gigabytes, which gets reset every 24h (You can still continue browsing after hitting the quota with lower speed). Meanwhile in the US, it's the same but your quota gets reset every billing period. Not sure which is the better model, but it's practically the same

I payed 140 Rupees per month for 10GB per day in January (Vodafone). Special deal on the poush mela. We tried, yes it is throttled after 10GB to a slower speed but continues to work. Who needs 10GB per Day anyways? I had to read and re-read the contract, i was first assuming it's per month but no, daily reset. And it works in all indian states. Tell me where on this planet there is cheaper data?

Have you tried to buy mobile data in the US recently? Nothing is unlimited. And if they say it is unlimited, you will get severely speed capped (128 kbps or even less) after X gigabytes.

Median income per annum in India would be about ~700 dollars per annum. Once one account most basic necessities of life there is not much money left to be paid for data plans in India. Its either you give them dirt cheap data plan or they won't use it.

Also not related to data plan but 22 out of 30 most polluted cities are in India. Just to put in perspective that their is more to life than cheap data plans. Broadband/data price is oddly a perennial obsession for relatively well earning group of people here.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/health/most-polluted-cities-i...

maybe i can answer this - pollution is out of your control as a "well earning person", you can't even support a party that has anti-pollution measures as a platform ticket coz no party bothers - that is how many people care. That plus pollution doesn't impact me in my area, it's only really bad in the poorer areas. You can't organize cleanups for multiple hectares of garbage dumps. even kids can't be educated to go throw trash in a dustbin as there usually isn't a dustbin in sight in poorer areas.

What does impact me daily and affects QoL that I personally can affect? Internet speeds,Bandwidth rates and the quality of my next meal.

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