Hacker News Reader

Comment by dzhiurgis | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why in countries with established infrastructure, automation and cheaper capital cost (albeit higher labor cost) the internet cost is around 10-20x more than in India?

Additionally, it's often ~5x slower than in 2nd world countries...

View on HN

Mobile data in Canada is notoriously expensive. The official justification is that it's a large, sparsely populated country. The actual explanation is regulatory capture by a cozy/corrupt domestic oligopoly that has successfully lobbied the government to stop foreign competitors.

Like Canada, Australia is also a very large, sparsely populated country but mobile data is fast and reasonably priced (e.g., https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans/value-packs/, which I use).

I remember visiting Canada (this was many years ago) and looking into local prepaid SIM cards. The cost of roaming data was actually cheaper than the data pricing on the local prepaid SIM cards...

It’s very embarrassing as a Canadian when foreigners visit and do things with their phones here that I wouldn’t dream of doing myself on a local plan.

Time for me to email my MP tonight.

Even Telstra is offering 60GB / month for $49

https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/sim-only-plans

I’d be all over that but it says the plan is only available for new services and I’m rather fond of my mobile number.

Does Australia not have mobile number portability?

When I worked on a project for Rogers I was shocked and surprised to see the prices they charge. Oh and the never ending confusion in those family plans! Hated that work!

Please tell them about Sweden, Romania, Finland - all sparsely populated by faster and cheaper data rates.

Comparing dollar prices in isolation makes almost no sense. You need to at least look at average/median monthly income and compare via some normalized metric, like a variant of Purchasing Power Parity [1] .

Even if you do this, comparisons are hard. Completely different economies, market structures and target groups, subsidies, taxation, regulation, etc can all have a big effect.

Looking at India, it has a GDP per Capita that's 1/8 of the US, and an average monthly income of 150$!

That should give you a measure for how 10$ in India are very different from 10$ in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

>Looking at India, it has a GDP per Capita that's 1/8 of the US

Okay, then lets multiply Indian prices by 8.

Someone up the thread quoted this:

>For 6 dollars 50 cents, you get 1.5 GB/day for 91 days.

Where in the US can I get 1.5GB/day for 91 days for $52 ?

Before someone talks about congestion, this is India, with 1.3 Billion people and "third world" infrastructure. If that kind of bandwidth can be provided to that many folks where people are routinely using it to watch TV channels (see Jio TV), why can't we do it here? I think congestion and data caps are just excuses to wring more money.

Not to be contrary, but that is almost exactly what I pay to T-Mobile (in the US) for unlimited data. I also have great coverage in rural parts of the country.

Strictly multiplying by 8 isn't really a good comparison, as the cost of supporting such a network in India isn't going to cost 1/8th as much as the US. I'm sure there's a lot of room for the US cellular carriers to be more efficient.

You pay $18/month for unlimited?

There is a pre-paid T-Mobile MVNO called Mint who will give you 3 to 12GB/month LTE for $15 to $25/month, with unlimited at slower speeds when you go over your limit. To get those prices, you buy in bulk, prepaying 12 months at a time. If you need to buy extra LTE capacity in one month, they charge $20 for 3GB increments.

In reality though, I think many US users here probably get the majority of their bandwidth over WiFi and do not really use that much LTE data. But, if I wanted to replace my $70/month cable Internet with just a Mint subscription, i.e. the $25/month plus 2x $20 refills, that would buy 18 GB/month of LTE.

Absolutely not. Thanks for pointing that out. I definitely misread the grandparent's post to be monthly (which means I'm paying 3x). I think ~$2.16/month is so cheap that it didn't register as possible.

I do, however, have truly unlimited, which means I can tether without hesitation. T-Mobile does have unlimited plans at $35/line a month for 55 or older, but that is still twice the $18/month price.

As the sibling post states, there are competitive plans like Mint, or FreedomPop, which offer extremely cheap plans, but nowhere near 1.5GiB of data a day. So I guess we are much further away than I thought we were.

Absolutely correct to note his, but e.g. Germany is above the USA in that PPP list, but for €8 I get 3GB of data and unlimited phone calls and sms.

If things are competitive, it makes more sense to look at cost than PPP-adjusted price. PPP is an overall metric that doesn't always apply to specific items; it's not like the price of an iPhone is any different in India. And GP gives a pretty fair list of things that influence cost.

Theoretically this might be true, but Jio revolution is real in India. Even extremely poor blue collar workers have good internet data.

Not sure this applies to everywhere, but I can talk about Romania (Eastern Europe) vs. Western Europe.

Romania has some of the best Internet in the world; as far as I recall, you can get 1Gbps for like 10-15 dollars in most non-rural areas. I think that's partly because of the huge amount of competition that was present in the early 00s, when we had a ridiculous amount of ISPs per city, and partly because all the cables are suspended on top of lampposts, as opposed to buried under the sidewalks and streets. That's way cheaper than digging half the city for new, higher-speed Internet.

And also because there was almost no infrastructure to begin with. So when one was created it went straight to fiber, while the western countries still got plenty of copper.

Similar thing in Poland (although our network is in worse condition than in Romania, but we still can have 1 Gbps for about 18 USD, even in some rural areas like mine :).

I think this is quite similar to the banking sector, we have most of the banks internet ready, some of them are are mostly internet, with very few brick and mortar places. When my colleague went to Switzerland he was shocked how the banks there force one to visit them personally to do even basic stuff (at least in the beginning - in Poland I can create banking account without leaving my home, I just need to wait for package to sign in front of a courier) - and have crappy websites.

This is also a leftover of the early internet migration, now they don't have enough incentive to do it better.

Pretty sure there were phone lines just like everywhere. Maybe no cable tho?

Back in Lithuania cable was installed everywhere in early 90s, but cable internet didn’t catch on.

P.S. saw an ad here the other day - €3/week for 1TB of LTE data.

India is a relatively cheap country to live in. You earn less & you spend less.

And service isn't that stellar. They say 4G but 400 KiB/s is average IMO. I am from rural india & used net before that on lowend J2ME phones, which was around 10 KiB/s.

Having said that, jio has done a great job, where otherwise 1GiB of 2G data cost >$5.

Total guess, but it seems like labor cost will do it? It drives up acquisition costs for getting customers. Combine with many customers not being very motivated to reduce costs, which both increases acquisition costs and reduces the downside from charging more.

Because labor costs are by far the biggest expense for companies.

and real estate is up there too. right-of-way for fiber and renting rooftops for base stations is a major telcom cost driver.

I once used a 200Gb per month plan on China Telecom in Pakistan. I regretted buying it as it would need few days downloading things non stop to reach exhaust that plan.

One factor that helps operators in India is the massive subscriber base. Nearly a billion people ought to spread the high fixed costs of telco infra to a decent point.

Because they have fixed-line internet infrastructure they want to sell you too.

Break apart the fixed line business from the wireless business and you’ll see one crush the other.

Cheap equipment and population density, dealing with Indian companies is like testing your patience with their never-ending bid to seek even lower prices.

I think this may have to do with density, India is 1/4 the size of the US and has 4X the population.

You have to pay rent for antennas. That's directly correlated to local price levels.

Because they can charge more, so they do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com