The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

Services not being available by region, that can be a bummer but that's not really a problem on internet service provider as such.

Also, I am surprised that one more country is building a GFW.

Most people do not have an option to move across continents just because somethings are cheaper there. And internet service is one small part of overall things one has do deal with in their daily lives.

Another way to cheaper price is that most jobs done in first world is to be outsourced to much cheaper places, which is happening. Or push lot of middle class jobs to subsistence level jobs, which is also happening.

What is a "Canadian internet plan"? Service is far different in rural Northern Ontario than it is in Toronto.

Firewalls and maintaining them aren't free. Cheaper to let it all pass through, especially when it isn't harmful to the network itself.

All for having an IP address originating from such regions with cheap internet that you can't do much with anyway.

Unless you’re willing to make some huge concessions you won’t find a phone plan with unlimited calling, unlimited texting, and 1GB of data for less than $40 CAD / month. I currently do BYOD + 3Mb/s throttle + no support + low priority on saturated towers (IMO but not provable) for $23 per month.

I wish the government would set reasonable pay per use data rates and make all the carriers abide by them. $12 / GB would be a godsend for low end, price sensitive users.

1Gb of internet in Australia ($0.68) is fantastic value compared to 1Gb of internet in Canada ($12.55). Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst the fastest in the world.

Now, after my trip, I went to India. I paid $10 for 1.5GB of data DAILY from Airtel (India's top provider) which also includes free unlimited calls. The experience isn't uniform (India is quite huge in comparison to Singapore) but within any tier A city, Airtel is MUCH better than Singtel. Also, the customer support is top notch for the peanuts you pay them and you can find an operator to talk to in usually a minute or less. For comparison, in Singtel, you would have to navigate the crazyily designed IVR and wait for atleast 5+ minutes before you can talk to a real person.

I'm just citing this example to prove that the most expensive 1GB isn't necessarily the best.

https://www.zong.com.pk/internet/mbb-plans

The cheapest provider sells unlimited data for 2.90€/mo, but the speed is limited and they are a smaller player so their coverage is too. From the big players, truly unlimited data with no speed caps is 20€/mo (the largest capped plan is 120GB for 11€/mo, 0.09c/GB). And of course they have discounts if you have other services from the same provider.

In any case, I believe politicians have ties with these companies (and probably own shares) and will not encourage movements trying to split the manypoly apart.

That's what the US should do too, especially for home internet. For mobile there are a few pretty OK MVNO like Mint but for home internet there is 0 competition in a lot of areas.

This is exactly what US needs to do to bring back competition. Sadly even Wheeler who reclassified Internet to Title II, excluded that part of it.

Back in late 90s and early 2000, we had huge competition, exactly because of Title II (DSL, which ruled the net back then, because was under telecos automatically was under Title II, so your phone lines could be leased to other companies). In 2003 Internet was officially classified under Title I which ended this (including net neutrality) and here we are now.

This one change alone is enough to explain quite a bit of the disparity in prices.

I'm actually surprised the source article makes no mention of this.

Exact same thing happened in France when the opened up phone operators for regular lines (not mobile). They made competitors rent the existing infrastructure and then compete on pricing/services. We went from paying for every call minute to unlimited phone plans very quickly.

Here in Germany it feels like a cartel. Prices are pretty homogeneous and quite expensive (I pay 10EUR/4weeks for 2.5Gb + 200 call min or SMS, pay-as-you-go). The home broadband is worse in terms of competition. Contracts are typically 24 months or more with draconian cancellation options.

At least pretty much everything else here (apart from Internet) is cheaper in Berlin than it is in Israel ;-)

1. Ban plan cancellation fees - You can cancel your plan anytime you want without any fees, always. There isn't even an option to choose between plans with cancellation fees and without, it's just not allowed. 2. Reducing the complexity to move to a different carrier - All you have to do is tell the new carrier and they will do the rest, and you get to keep the number if you choose to

Unfortunately in Portugal cancellation fees are still a thing, I think this is a big factor for competition

Yeah, this was excellent for 4G prices (I'm paying $8/mo for 40 GB), but now telecom companies are wary of installing 5G infrastructure, because they are forced to share it with other service providers who did not have to invest millions in new 5G infrastructure.

Also, browsing can be something like: - Ad blocking - Javascript disabled by default - remote fonts disabled - media eg images disabled if possible - cookies disabled by default

The first 2 are possible using UBlock Origin + Firefox on Android devices. Ad blocking is a must.

Also, you can use some local VPN app like netguard to restrict app's data usage. I don't remember whether you can specify data usage limits though. But it can prevent entire apps from accessing internet.

Then about web pages. On desktop I routinely use text browsers or simple GUI browsers because they are so fast. Even your regular browser can go a long way with JS disabled by default and ad blocking.

[Of course an Android modified by your phone company or product manufacturer may not do this]

There's also an overall summary month-by-month for apps.

Long press the mobile connection, pick App data usage and you get a chart and a list, ordered by amount used and with a warning that your operator might count things differently†

Mine says Pokemon Go uses a lot of bandwidth, which makes sense, also one of the free games I play made some requests while I was away from home and I unblocked it, after that comes Chrome looking at web sites.

†e.g. New Zealand zero rated all their COVID-19 related government services, and as a free bonus they get to find out how much the providers think that's worth and decide if in fact they'd prefer all government services were zero rated forever)

It's not an issue with web apps but issue with outdated bandwith limiting.

And it's not like people don't have FOSS tools to optimize images, or read for free on how to make browser load smaller or different format (like webp) of images on smaller screen devices.

Often times developers just don't care because it doesn't cost them anything.

So disabling all images in the browser is a must if one doesn't want to pay for grabage stock photos, and experience suffers on all websites as a result. I don't really consider sending all browsing data to Google by using their image optimization proxy as an alternative.

I have seen this first hand with so many of my educated friends and relatives who were reasonable folks before internet boom and now they come across caricature of dimwit person. With so much information available on internet they still chose to pick lowest quality sources.

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

I moved out in 2017, but I'm glad for the LTE access that my parents can use from the same tiny city (with DSL Line, now at 1mbps as an alternative). It's great! Indeed, lots left to do about other issues, but I think we get to be happy about this particular development.

I might as well get a SIM shipped to me from Italy every three months or so, it'll be lots cheaper.

Iliad is pretty great. Given that by law there are both a minimum number of players and incentives for the entry of a new players, Iliad managed to get pretty awesome pretty fast.

I'm from the UK and pay £5 for unlimited data, which admittedly is better than most plans here.

Probably by using median as you suggested? Because it's impossible for mean to be less than 2.68.

Nobody uses SMS anymore.

Then the operators went to the state to cry there and say thousands of people will lose their work. They cried, cried, saw that they would not get anything so they came back home and lowered their prices to align with Free Mobile.

There were no massive layoffs.

This is one of there rare cases where the French slowness to change was different.

Except that provision of basic mono-utilities such as drinking water, roads, and The Internet is probably best provided by the state. At least the cell phone tower part, leaving the internet exchange part upwards to private companies.

(This pre supposes a level of benevolence / lack of malevolence from the state, or a faith in protocols further up the stack to have end to end security. At least one of these exists.)

Unfortunately their UK network is awful, slow and broken, so I had to leave them. But I really miss the roaming.

Right now for example I'm paying 50$ for 30mbps unlimited* yearly plan here in Thailand. The map in the article puts Thailand at avg 1.2$/GB which would net 42GB a year for 50$ which is a much worse deal.

Finally I feel it's very hard to measure this. If you look at the article's map the avg/cheapest/most expensive vary by an absurd margin. Again Thailand is 0.2$ cheapest and 7.2$ most expensive — that 32x difference. This data seems to be absolutely useless for drawing any sort of conclusions.

\* unlimited up to some point.

Not sure where you get that impression, but I don't think it is true at all. The following are the standard CH mobile plans by the largest providers in Switzerland.

Swisscom: 3×unlimited, 3×limited

Salt: 3×unlimited, 2×limited

Sunrise: 1×unlimited, 2×limited

In total they have 7 unlimited and 7 limited plans. The unlimited are mostly very expensive. Also note that the article mentioned they measured 14 plans in total which exactly matches the total number of plans above. But that of course might be a coincidence. Most plans of smaller providers are also limited in my experience.

For example, if a GB is $1 in America and 2 euros in Germany, then we would use a 1:2 ratio for converting the price. So Germany's PPP price would now be $1 in dollars as well. As you can see, this isn't very helpful.

PPP's fundamental assumption is the law of one price, so it's no surprise that all the prices would be the same using it.

For internet, the widespread introduction of fiber has really made a huge impact. My father, who lives in a rural area, has 1000GB internet at 40 EUR per month.

One reason is labor costs. Imagine how much it costs to build and maintain one tower in Norway with its high standard of living for everyone vs in Myanmar where people will work for much less, and with lower safety standards.

And obviously providers will charge more if they can, less if they have to.

EDIT: On the "US is big" point, it's notable that pricing doesn't really follow population density in Europe. The UK has four times the population density of Ireland, but only fractionally cheaper data. Germany has similar population density to the UK, but far more expensive data (though I wonder are they looking at all extant contracts or something; data recently got a lot cheaper in Germany).

All three countries have comparable household earnings. Sweden has a third the population density of Ireland (less than a tenth that of the UK!), slightly higher average data cost, _cheaper_ minimum data cost, and comparable household earnings.

In general, any attempt to explain this via recourse to population density, income or GDP fails in the developed world.

There is also strict requirements on uptime and huge fines for telcos in western countries if the service goes down, even for just a moment. Needless to say that creating a resilient network costs a lot more.

(and $80-100 for the big bucket)

Median income India - $2k

Median income USA - $60k

I'm not sure where you get $15. The linked site says $8:

"with 1GB costing an average $12.55 in Canada and $8.00 in the US."

Nor do I get why you think all of Asia is inexpensive. South Korea is far worse than the US, despite a far lower median income, at $10.94 average. If you adjust that to the US, it's more like $24 (200% higher than the US). And Japan is fairly bad vs global prices as well when adjusted for income levels (around $6 to $6.50 equivalent in US terms).

Why are US prices higher than they should be? Two primary reasons. First, the two big telcos initiated (and held) the market at a very high price point from inception. The US was the first large cellular and smartphone market. It has taken limited competition, primarily in the form of T-Mobile, more than a decade to drag those high prices downward.

Second, wealth / income adjustments. Consider the Ukraine example. The US has ~20 times the GDP per capita of Ukraine in a typical year. Their $0.46 cost is comparable to more like $9.20 with a US adjustment, which is higher than the US cost. US median disposable incomes are among the highest, only comparable to smaller affluent countries like Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland.

You also can't sell 1gb for $10 in Ukraine, it's not a very good business model. The people can't afford those prices. The telecom operators in countries like Ukraine do not make very much money selling mobile plans.

Most telecom operators around the world operate at very thin margins with low profits. Verizon by itself generated $30.4 billion in operating income in 2019. AT&T generated $29.4 billion in operating income. T-Mobile generated $5.7 billion in operating income.

So between the three US telecom operators, that's $65.6 billion in operating income every year (best compared to Apple or Microsoft in size). The entire rest of the world has nothing remotely like that profit bonanza, outside of a select few large operators.

But because you can’t just add more wires to the airwaves, there is a limited amount of bandwidth no matter what you do. So that’s fair.

They offer unlimited tethering still 512Kbps.

Another will be to bring down quality of service level. A couple of years back I was india and area where my mother lived had service down for like a week. That area must have a population of at least few 100Ks.

Third to have very little customer service staff. People here have legitimately said why the hell do I care about 1000s of customer service/call center staff. I want my service cheap. In countries like India they have done that. Social media call these companies evil but I think they are just trying to run cheap service.

Fourth is to spend much less on network equipments and field testing. Service is announced at much cheaper price point but backend systems are severely overloaded so one gets much more network/call drops.

- Ban on SIM-locking of phones to one provider

- Allowing users to change providers without losing their phone number

- Ban on "exit penalties" for customers leaving a contract

- Forcing existing infrastructure providers to share their infrastructure with virtual or not-yet-fully-deployed new providers

That's what's always missing from these tests, reliability. It's more important than data cap and speeds.

How come you stopped in Egypt and didn't go back to Morocco?

Tunisia is a great country to visit.

Fun fact, in Mexico (and most of Latin America), North America is simply a subregion of the real continent “America” that includes North, Central, and South as one.

Prior to WWI or II, the US used that definition (The Americas) as well IIRC.

TMobile -> Metro PCS

Verizon -> Visible

ATT -> Cricket

The wallet cost of mobile data is lower than the inflated prices shown on the website.

The cost of the labor to keep these networks running should obviously factor into the price as you can't take data from Indonesia and use it elsewhere (you can manufacture things in Indonesia and ship them here, so for goods it might make sense to compare global prices; not so for data plans). The best way to do that is probably purchasing power.

But this can also mean that a single poor decision can leave you data less (or rationing) for the rest of the month. Most plans just lock you up until you pay more, rather than continue throttled.

Then you have software obviously written by people with zero consideration for data costs. NPR One app thinks it's a great idea to pre-stream hundreds of MB of content. Thanks NPR. Zoom doesn't have any low-bandwidth modes. While iOS lets you enforce a 'low-data mode' when tethering to metered connections, OS X doesn't. Thanks OS X for downloading that update while I was on a train. I was doing my best to ration what I had left by using Lynx for fuck's sake.