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Comment by justaguyhere | Hacker News Reader

Americans are going to be livid when they learn how cheap data plans are in India. The reason this works is free market, unlike the US where the likes of Comcast have monopoly in the regions they operate.

Hasan Minhaj did a show this week on Netflix, you should watch it - he explains pretty well how horrible Comcast like companies are.

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It's weird. I'm an American living in Russia. Here, we have many more choices for cell phone plans. And they're all cheap and innovative vs even the cheapest US plan. Competition really does work!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_industry_in_Russi...

Woah woah. Do you have a professional license and liability insurance to practice that opinion in public near the presence of children?

Next up americans are going to be angry about how much cheaper rent, food and services are cheaper in india too!

They aren't the standard purchasing power differences, it's literally orders of magnitude cheaper.

Probably true, but how does that jive with the perception that it was all triggered by below-cost discounts from the likes of Jio to grab market share at a huge loss, and that it's not sustainable?

Jio don't seem to be operating at a loss [0] at all. From what I can see of the numbers it seems sustainable, though their fibre offerings muddy the waters a bit.

[0] https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/relian...

Had no idea about India, but I am gearing up to move to the UK soon and was looking into phone plans.

Even Europe is way, way cheaper than America. Why is it so expensive here? Anyone know? Is it just that a few companies run the market and can charge what they want? Or are there less nefarious reasons?

Cable TV, internet, phone, flights and medicine are all very expensive in the US compared to the rest of the world.

The thing they all have in common is high barriers to entry and very few competitors. So basically lack of competition.

>Americans are going to be livid when they learn how cheap data plans are in India. The reason this works is free market, unlike the US where the likes of Comcast have monopoly in the regions they operate.

What does Comcast have to do with the price of cellular data?

Because they're Xfinity Mobile. Their plans are $12 per GB of data.

But they don't have a monopoly in any area. Xfinity Mobile is just a Verizon MVNO. Grandparent is simply using the wrong company as an example.

Show is The Patriot Act. Episode is volume 3 episode 6, 'Internet Inequality'.

I have seen his two videos on Indian Politics , it's outright, biased.

You can go through the comments of Youtube for more clarification.

Blame the US regulators.

Free market doesn't exists and Economic liberalism is a lie. It's all about the circumstances leading to the consumption of some products of services.

>Americans are going to be livid when they learn how cheap data plans

Why? They're cheap because the average income in India is 1000 dollars a year. And there is probably little to no regulation when it comes to setting up infrastructure.

Eh, Verizon just offered unlimited data for free for my whole family.

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