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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

I'd wonder how they're accounting for 'unlimited' plans. In Ireland, for instance, about a third of people would be using Three, and most of their plans are 'unlimited' (in practice, there are limits after which they'll throttle you, I believe, but they're high).

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I'm in the U.S., and I pay for an unlimited 4G plan and download a lot. My price per GB is cheaper than 9 cents/GB which is what the article reports as India's average price.

Not only that, but at peak times in rural areas where people use mobile broadband as their main connection, Three internet slows to a crawl. I suspect it's the backhaul from the mobile mast but I'm not sure.

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

> I suspect it's the backhaul from the mobile mast but I'm not sure.

It might be in some cases, but in most cases that backhaul will be a very scalable fibre line. It's probably more down to limited spectrum. Three attracts heavy users, because their pricing is designed around them, so they have the most loaded network, and they can't just manufacture new spectrum (they can add new towers up to a point, but there's a lot of cost to that). 5G should help, somewhat.

They're not. They're deluded if they think anybody in Western Europe is paying $3.13 per GB in 2020. ;-)

Someone having a 1GB plan might, because of the base costs. But of course someone with a larger plan wouldn't, which makes it impossible to get a meaningful "average" here (+ the question if you value phone minutes/SMS or not). Comparing pricepoints of similarly sized plans would be a lot more meaningful.

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