In Finland the average amount of data transferred per SIM card is 17.3GB/month
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Sometimes, the situation has been so absurd that I've had to use the share Network function with a friend's phone to fool my phone into believing I'm on wifi so I could download an update.
https://www.dw.com/en/fnord/a-49168657 was the top hit just now when I searched for 5G auctions. I've no idea how much telcos pay in other countries, but the top six hits for my search were all about Germany, which at least doesn't suggest that Finland is raking in record sums from its auctions.
When it comes to it, 6.5bn _sounds_ like a lot, but it's only 78 euro per capita, and that's buying the telcos permanent assets which will be useful for decades to come.
As for price, I've got 3 mobile lines with infinite data plus my home wifi at 600mbps and the whole thing costs 100€/month.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/mo...
I don't know what iOS is doing, as they still didn't have proper data metering and limiting the last time I checked.
(side rant: in the following ten years, the tech giants sweeped in, competed, provided a better service, with better cross-platform support, for zero dollar immediate cost to the end customer -- gained a massive following (think whatsapp), and are now vilified for their "monopoly" and the "harm" it has caused.)
Wait what? They charge you for receiving text messages or am I not reading that right? Do they also charge you to receive phone calls haha?
My Mom is still on a strict per minute plan, with a stored value plan though. I think she gets free incoming text, but has to pay for calls or texts she sends.
I really wonder whether young members of the family consume more or less data, or what other reason could be used to justify family-discounting.. but it’s probably like a parent comment said: there’s no correlation between costs to the carrier and price the consumer pays; the single/family split exists to create the maximum profit off both groups by penalizing single people and convincing families to add all younger members to the plan (even those that might not need it). IMO carriers should give an age discount for under 18, not a per-line reduction the more members are in your plan.
(It's also true that I long predate cell phones--and also am often in places that don't have cell phone coverage--so I really don't have the mindset that I always have to be reachable right now.)
What I’m doing in the meantime is popping my sim from my smartphone into an old Nokia.
Cricket wants as many subscribers as possible, so they give discounts to groups of four.
Isn't that how it works elsewhere?
If so, what is mind boggling about the US using the same system for other communications networks besides the internet?
>what is mind boggling
What's your phone number? I'll txt you every 10 minutes for a month. And you'll pay for it. Like it or not. Mind boggling.
Friends would get angry at each other for sending a message, or breaking a sentence into two messages.
Again, I think it is INSANE that half the US legislature is trying to fault WhatsApp (100% no dollar cost) for being a "monopoly" given the situation that was fixed. https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_dig...
Low sms pricing was on its way anyway since the cost of one byte sms was like 10 000 fold to ip data.
For calls you used to get a pleasure with a set amount of minutes, such as 200, 500, and 1000 per month. Most carriers let you "roll over" unused minutes and typically anything after 9pm didn't count. Though I remember cingular offering 7pm as the unlimited time if you paid an extra fee (don't remember the cost).
Slowly larger plans, then unlimited became more normal. I can of remember it becoming more cost effective the same time more people were getting internet through cable or dsl, instead of dial up. So 2002-2005ish?
I also seem to remember that if you started a call at (for example) 6:59pm, and it lasted an hour, all 60 minutes were "premium" minutes, not 1 "premium" and 59 "free/unlimited".
Call call = new Call(timestamp);
String hour = call.getHour();
if (hour < 19 hour && hour > 6) call.setRate("Premium"); //military time
this would have been 'revenue maximization', much like banks that will order your check deposits and outgoings to maximize any fees for bounced checks. Process the outgoings first, so if there's any fees to be had, you can rake 'em in.
And yep, they charged for calls you received too: You might get 500 minutes of talk time under a given plan, and incoming calls counted against that. I think my first cell phone plan in 2001 was about $50/month for 400 minutes, no texting because I couldn't afford a phone that supported it or the added cost in the plan.
I guess the rationale was that there is no difference in the numbering plan in North America between cell phones and land lines. Calls to a cell phone cost more but the caller has no way to tell they’re calling one. So the caller pays the same to call a cell or a landline and the callee pays to receive the call too so that overall carriers get more money for completing allegedly more expensive cell minutes.
Yes, that's how ridiculous the US and Canada systems are
Everyone is aware that it's not some benevolence of one company over another but actual market operation that brings down the prices. That's why Apple's ability to impose restrictions and take a 30% cut of unrelated transactions is concerning: there's no market for competing Apple stores.
(There have been telcos that tried to ban VOIP, but not in the West)
OS Update ( and may be App Update ) Download should happen during Midnight when everyone is asleep ( when the network is quiet ) and those Data should be exempt from their Data Allowance.
There are increasing amount of people with no WiFI or Wired Internet connection at home. ( Mostly because how convenient Mobile Phone and Network has become ), but they still need OS update. Software and Apps still take the view many features requires a WiFi.
5G will massively improve Network Capacity, but at the current rate of things it still take at least 4 years for most of the iPhone users to be 5G Ready. Which means we wont see any of these WiFi by default changes in the foreseeable future.
Some tools allow to control this, but others will update the shit out of your mobile plan as soon as it can see wifi.
On the other hand I mostly like how roaming was solved in Android phones I had. It allowed me to choose which apps can use it and constantly monitored current usage of each.
I've got my mom and grandpa on same mobile plans without any fixed connectivity and the only time their iPhones backup is when I visit and hotspot them. It's crazy!
Interesting, because until recently I had the reverse problem. I had to fight everything on my phone (and occasionally, my system) to stop doing updates and backups over mobile connections, because those were always limited in Poland. I'm not sure if anyone truly does offer an unlimited plan here (other than bullshit "unlimited, but we'll throttle you down for the rest of the month after a gigabyte or three"). Bottomline: it's not just US. I think most of the world doesn't have ubiquitous unlimited mobile data.
This. Although India has the cheapest data next to Finland, the ground reality is quite different.
I tried using 4G as my primary internet connection after COVID, and I got frustrated by "hidden" limits and random throttling from the ISP - ended up getting a fiber line.
The 4G modem was a complete waste of money.
If you are offering a 20GB plan, just say you are offering a 20GB plan.
I've tried to use a 4G hotspot to setup my laptop and do work in outdoor parks but the number of times I can do that per month is limited.
For example, they can no longer advertise the "up to" speeds, they have to use the "typical evening speed", which is what's more relevant to the actual experience.
If you want an interesting test, find someone with a Telstra post-paid plan, and get a Boost Mobile SIM in another phone. Run speedtests side by side. Boost, although it's technically Telstra Pre-Paid, seems to be heavily throttled.
A mate works for Optus and had for a while a bunch of different iPhones of the same generation for testing.
Each had the same OS version/etc.
One on Optus Business, one on Retail Postpaid and one on a reseller (iirc Virgin).
Speed tests side by side were pretty interesting. You could quite clearly see the business service was getting prioritisation over all the others. Retail was generally better than the Reseller by quite a margin. Some locations (like shopping centres) would restrict the reseller from working at all, and retail would be clamped down on bandwidth.
i.e take the phones out, and run all the speed tests at once - the business plan was guaranteed to run faster.
It wasn't like it was an issue with one particular phone just being better - you could swap the sim cards between phones and no matter what device the business sim was in, it got the best throughput.
How they actually implemented it I don't know, all we could go on was based on some testing from an end-user perspective.
It wasn't done as a "isn't that interesting" thing, it was because of some specific problem with a client that was reporting poor performance.
There should be a real financial incentive to upgrade their lousy infrastructure.
Throttled is still unlimited in the same way as any other connection. Your connection is always throttled, it's just a question if there are two different speeds with the latter triggering after a particular threshold.
The bitrate you get when most plans throttle is 128Kbps, less than a tenth of that speed.
Trouble is that the politicians are some of the worst offenders when it comes to deceptive advertising.
What you are looking for is competition, and lower barriers to entry.
The UK used to be famous for really confusing strategies, like bogus discounts (50% off on an item that's just priced 2x normal), or buy-3-get-5 offers, that sometimes mysteriously wouldn't be registered at checkout.
The UK regulator often dinged the supermarkets for such behaviour, and gave them various stipulations. But as far as I can tell, they only really got better when Aldi and Lidl seriously started taking market share.
Aldi and Lidl have a very German no-nonsense approach to advertising. There's a single simple price that you pay.
Similarly in the UK, the regulator always told off the retail banks for their bad behaviour, but they never really changed their tune much. I am hoping that challengers like Monzo are changing that. (I left the UK nearly three years ago, so I don't know how retail banking has come along in the meantime.)
UK retail banks usually advertise that their accounts are 'free', but then have lots of hidden fees. Monzo doesn't have those hidden fees. (Eg when you try to make a transfer when you are out of money, Monzo just fails your transfer. My previous British retail banks charged you for that. And they typically gave you an 'unarranged overdraft' that you couldn't decline.)
Keep in mind that these are two examples of the top of my head. You can probably find more with a more scientific inquiry.
> It seems to me that it mostly leads to a race to the bottom that just optimizes for hiding your dishonesty better.
Do you have any examples of that?
Competition usually leads to customers getting more of what they are willing to pay for. Of course, that's not always what customers say they want, if you ask them outright.
(Eg Starbucks sells well. But what they are selling is not what people say they value in coffee.
I wouldn't call that dishonesty on Starbucks site. People pay for having a spot with free wifi to idle or work while sipping some acceptable beverages. People who go to Starbucks are not there to satisfy a distinguished taste in coffee. But Starbucks advertisement compliments on their good taste, anyway.)
Plus reduction in overall speeds beside Zoom during specific times of the day almost like clockwork, this too in recent months also made me feel that there is some hidden throttling at play.
This seems like the market functioning correctly. People who can be hardwired should be hardwired, so that scarce RF spectrum is available for those who don't have an alternative.
It's about trade-offs. Ie how much would it inconvenience you to be hardwired vs the other guy? How much are you willing to pay?
Saturating the connection between your handset and the LTE cell tower shouldn't put that much of a strain on the fibre glass backhaul of the tower.
At least where I live, I doubt it would warrant flying engineers around some planes. (But then, you'd be hard pressed to find a domestic hardwired connection below 500 Mbps. 1 or 2 Gbps are more common for domestic connections here. And we have some spots with faster than gigabit LTE connections.)
And the tariff here is kinda rigged to make you buy data. The economics don't work out unless you subscribe to a daily data plan in addition to the voice plan.
I have two such SIMs, one for the home router (because it's cheaper and faster than FTTC) and another for my phone.
Usage varies, but on a busy month the home SIM will see 100-300 GB, mostly for Netflix. The phone SIM sees about 10-30 GB.
Speed varies by time of day, but at peak it's 90 Mbit/s down, 20 Mbit/s up. At the slowest times of day it drops to about 8 Mbit/s down. The phone is faster than the router, so I've occasionally switched to using the phone to download something large.
Last time I checked, there was technically a cap on the monthly data of 3 TB. For a while they also limited tethering to 30 MB, i.e. using the phone as a wifi hotspot, and then (if they detected it) you could theoretically be charged a lot for tethered data over that cap. But they officially removed that restriction a few years ago.
The links are a bit unreliable. But the FTTC connection I had before was more unreliable, and more than twice the price. The FTTC connection before that was nearly three times the price (gouging - it started out cheaper than quietly kept increasing a lot). And if I move home, I can take my link with me now, instead of being tied into a 12 month contract at a fixed location.
I was sort of sad to replace it with FTTP, which has been slightly more unreliable
Crucially: how long are you contractually tied to your cell provider?
So I edited the comment to FTTC for clarification. When sold it was probably just "Superfast Broadband".
Looking at marketing now, I see "Faster Broadband", "Fibre Broadband", "Superfast Fibre", "Ultrafast Fibre", "Fibre Optic Broadband"... It's impossible to tell from marketing whether it's FTTC, FTTP or something else.
Docsis is very very popular, virgin media is the only national Docsis network and accounts for a significant portion of urban connections (though less than the percentage that would trigger a competition breakup like bt)
How can they detect that?
I'm pretty sure I've come across different APNs being used before (on the Giffgaff MVNO using O2s UK network), but don't recall the details.
You have two Scandinavian countries on opposite ends of the spectrum, two east Asian countries on opposite ends, and even two countries with significantly large landmass (look at Russia only two spots short of Korea). What gives?
Before I moved away to the US I was grandfathered into a $80CAD 8Gig/month plan and that was actually considered VERY good compared to what was available. Now in the US I pay $50USD for unlimited and burn through 25 gigs a month.
The Japanese government is concerned about the high prices and low competition and is currently in the process of having the legacy telco parent company (with 30% government ownership) re-acquiring the mobile operator. https://www.lightreading.com/5g/ntt-to-reacquire-docomo-for-...
The three Scandinavian countries are not really on opposite ends.
If your Norwegian plan includes just 1GB data and free everything else then the price is probably at least twice the amount in the chart.(~12€)
If your plan has 100GB then a normal price would normally be ~0.46€/GB.
According to the definition written on the chart, you get "unlimited" data(1TB+) for 46€/month in Norway using the biggest provider. Data is a lot cheaper in Norway than the US, that's for sure.
I pay about 15 USD/mo.
I'm not saying you should do this, just that it's also quite easy to save 90% of your data usage without reducing media consumption if you are so inclined.
On the one hand, I feel like I'm preaching and practicing abstinence by doing things like downloading videos that I want to watch in the bus ahead of time over WiFi. On the other, long-range mobile data only works because we're not all using it at the same time, that's why we we meter it per month: it's a poor man's way of limiting concurrent usage while allowing bursty traffic and keeping the limits understandable to consumers. If you use a lot of data or need a lot of bandwidth reliably (e.g. IT company), running a local network yourself is the obvious way to go today. But with small cells coming to a bus stop near you, and seeing just how easy mobile data is compared to WiFi that can be out of range more easily (or you may be connected to a faraway access point), can be down and nobody is on call to fix it (in a company, someone might be on call for WiFi, but at home?), etc., it seems clear that for 98-99% of people and 90-95% of companies, using mobile data exclusively is the medium-term future (let's say around 2040).
And if it is the future, and since I use anywhere between 50GB and 2TB per month in data on my home internet connection (not counting others in the house), mobile data will need to handle such figures per person as well. More, even, because it will be in the future.
Someone having a 20GB+ mobile data plan is not exactly weird to me, even if with a little bit of foresight you can limit your usage to 1-2GB a month (and that still allows for quite a bit of video calling and occasional videos on the go) and save a bunch of money in 2020 (something on the order of subscribing to both netflix and spotify premium).
To want it perhaps not, but do you see people do this around you? I've seen more people gaming (laptop and mouse) on a train than people watching streaming video on the train. There have been more people that watched videos but when they pause for the conductor it's virtually always VLC or WMP, revealing that it's pre-downloaded. (I know VLC can do streaming but I'd have seen buffering here and there and they're much more likely to use the service's own client because of DRM.)
So while I don't say it's weird to have that desire (it would certainly be easier not to have to plan this ahead), yes, it is unusual in the Netherlands. And now that I live in Germany I'd say it's not just unusual but impossible, given their mobile data network coverage.
My experience has been different. Sydney, Australia for reference - our data costs are relatively low at about 0.68 USD per GB (down from 1 USD or so last year if I were to guess). When I've looked around on packed trains in the past, about a third of the occupants were watching YouTube or Netflix (very rough estimate). Although obviously this strongly depends on where you are - for instance, when I was living in Japan, most people would be either playing games or reading news.
>revealing that it's pre-downloaded
Sure, but is because that's the way the prefer it, or is it a workaround that they've resorted to due to high data costs? Behaviour is a symptom of circumstance just as much as it is of desire, if that makes sense.
The argument I'm trying to make is that it's not that it's not that there's no demand, it's that the low supply results in people pursuing lower cost/higher effort alternatives.
Edit: But I'm not trying to say you're wrong. It's definitely interesting to hear what happens in the Netherlands and Germany. I appreciate your input.
Looking at my mobile data usage (which hasn't been reset since August), the top apps are 5 GB YouTube, 3 GB iOS system services (mainly document sync), 2.5 GB tethering, 1 GB photos app, 1.5 GB Twitter, 800 MB LINE messenger, 800 MB App Store, 600 MB music, 500 MB Safari, 500 MB Instagram, 350 MB Podcasts, etc etc
I too live in Singapore and the internet infrastructure is excellent. Currently I’m sitting at about 10gb/month on 4g without YouTube/Netflix/social media. I do use a fair amount of Reddit though. I don’t really want to go back to having to care about how much data I’m using.
Obviously if you don't watch video it's extremely hard to get close to these bandwidhs on a smartphone.
My total mobile bill is 700 Taiwan dollars a month, which is about 25 USD.
It'll be around $3 for unlimited traffic though.
For $30 a month true unlimited where you just don’t even think about data transfer.
Speeds in the 100 MB/s range most of the time and people seem to just take it for granted.
I personally average on about ~12GB per month. I pay Fr. 37.50 per month for unlimited calls and sms in Switzerland and unlimited data in Switzerland & the EU.
I would be curious to see how different mobility patterns in different places (e.g. I live in Singapore, where commutes are naturally short) affect mobile data usage vs. other more obvious factors like home internet penetration.
It feels like I use much more data when I'm back in the US or working on site, even if I have a fixed base to work at, just because of the amount of time I spend moving around.
Realistically speaking the 20USD/month is already quite reasonable, if world as it was pre-COVID I might coerce some friends and family to join the plan with me.
But I really would prefer 25 USD no strings attached.
There was some switch to 4G for home internet (with mifi/usb dongles) as well, mostly due to aggressive pricing some years back. It was a good alternative to ADSL and cheaper, but became congested once a lot of people started using it. Yet, fiber is much more ubiquitous these days and is much faster and cheaper than either of those.
If you live in a city there’s probably fibre laid down. Anywhere outside unless your neighbourhood pay for the fibre to each home you’re going to have to get a cellular modem :)
Sure, but I have 2/4 bars on both of my SIM cards in a ground floor apartment. It's pretty common considering how insulated the walls are. This is why the biggest speed tuneup you can do to your 4G router is running an antenna out of the window.
In rural areas the ADSL prices started climbing up a few years ago and most moved to cellular (60 euros for 21Mbps ADSL vs 25 euros for 50Mbps 4G). As of recent fiber connections are getting good in rural areas as well, so people are switching to fiber (40 euros for 100/100Mbps, 60 euros for 1000/1000Mbps). People who have both 4G router + fiber are quite rare.
In my experience some channels on 4G are quite ossified and during peak times you might even get a better throughput on 3G.
I don't buy the lack of competition argument honestly. Cellular data is a commodity. Cell towers are not exactly a utility to the extent that optical fiber/coax is. If there was margin to be exploited, capital would have flowed in to take advantage. But it's likely that the risk adjusted return in the cellular business is already too low to attract more players and drive down costs without a significant technology moat.
Now I use my phone as a mobile hotspot and do my work on it. I use about 30 or 40 gigs a month when I’m not at home.
The average Romanian would cross the national border and notice the phone have NO signal. No data, no GBs, no voice, only 112.
Truth be told we have only been in the EU for the past 13 years...
I don't like to watch video on my phone, I almost never hit the 2GB limit unless I try.
I am curious how you manage this? Are you torrenting 4k movies continuously?
My usage is usually right around 1 GB a month, and I'm constantly on my phone, social media, browsing, etc.
So what gives? Its similar to my usage pattern, only time I use mobile internet is when I am out of WiFi range
Maybe you're thinking of Iceland (population 364,000) rather than Finland (population 5.5 million)?
In terms of population only Finland sits between NYC (pop 8M+) and LA (4M).