What Does My Site Cost?
whatdoesmysitecost.com
whatdoesmysitecost.com
~~It seems to not run any scripts when testing, so 1.5MB is the basic JS + CSS.~~
In reality, it's much, much worse. (On a desktop)
Even with an adblocker, reddit.com downloaded 18MB in the first 10 seconds. That would put that cost at over $1.
I stopped after that because it seemed to be just continuously downloading... something.
I know Reddit is quite media driven these days, but it seems to be unnecessary prefetching a lot
Edit: Looks like I was testing the desktop version, see jefftk's reply.
However, it doesn't help reddit's case that much. After looking into what it's actually downloading in my "desktop" test, there are lots of huge PNG images (1000x1000 +) that seem to be displayed as tiny thumbnails.
And for an infinitely scrolling page, it prefetches all the images in the feed at full resolution.
If I turn off my adblocker, I get an autoplaying amazon ad (~5MB).
Additionally, it starts auto-playing a livestreams which is just below the fold.
I'm not sure how to replicate this but I would be curious what old.reddit.com does via an equivalent methodology.
They source their claim to a WebPageTest run [1], and WPT does run scripts. I can reproduce their results as:
1. Open an incognito window in Chrome
2. Open devtools, and configure it as mobile
3. Navigate to reddit.com
4. See ~1.5MB transferred
[1] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b...
I was using Firefox, but I could get the 1.55MB result by trying that.
1. New private browsing window
2. Open devtools networking
3. Responsive design mode: Galaxy S9
4. Load reddit.com
>>>DOWNLOAD THE APP<<<
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
firefox: 17.85 / 12.54 MB transferred, brave: 15 MB, vivaldi: 9.6 MB, chromium: 13.1 MB,
I actually think that Reddit is just loading less of the posts due to the small screen.
https://blog.webpagetest.org/posts/understanding-the-new-cum...
Recently on teddit.net, I've been getting an "Unable to connect" via some Tor Exit Nodes. So I'm having to create new circuits until teddit loads.
I loaded https://www.reddit.com/ in Firefox with an adblocker; the network inspector showed 4.8 MB transferred.
I'm not able to reproduce this either. Here's a desktop WPT run: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_BiDcXB_65148b09266...
Could you share a screenshot, or a link to one of these oversized PNGs?
That would make it $200+ to load the page including the advert.
Highest I've actually paid was in China at £3 per megabyte, and not only did I use normal phone stuff like data and email, because the UK network I was on allowed connections to my company, but the local wifi didn't, when I accidentally connected plugged in my phone without disabling tethering, the laptop started downloading stuff - ran up a $400 bill in about a minute before the flood of text messages I get every 5MB started to arrive (out of order) and I realised what was going on.
It seemed more of a marketing gimmick than a useful tool.
After basic troubleshooting T-Mobile requested that I call their international support on a 2nd phone and they would happily help me fix the problem with the original mobile phone.
Of course I didn't have access to a 2nd phone, I was livid. Cancelled the contract with T-Mobile and got local service. Even in cancelling T-Mobile couldn't get it right, they sent me two additional bills for trivial amounts in the months that followed. Each bill under a dollar.
Unless you have a device with radios that happen to support extra bands that are not used in the US, then it's essentially incompatible with the Japanese network despite both being "LTE".
The biggest issue is the phone bands, if your phone does not support the local bands, it will not connect.
I had no issue having a secondary phone in Japan w/ my T-mobile sim and having a local NTT sim. With dual sim/esim even easier nowadays to run both networks.
T-Mobile's free 128kbs is enough for whatapp, navigation and a few emails (Their MAX plan gives free 256kbs).
In international locations to your point it gets you enough for Maps and Mail, and some basic web browsing. You won't be streaming, that's for sure. However, if I need more than that, I use it to bootstrap an e-sim like GigSky which you can then route all data traffic to (at least on iOS) via Cellular settings.
This way you keep your phone number, iMessage, texting, and get 5G data too.
I recall getting a text about that £7.20 fee during a flight a couple years ago.
Yet they still have a worse video player than what was available in the early 2000s
Edit - after waiting about a minute it crept up to 5.2MB transferred for somehow the same amount of uncompressed resources.
I would take those numbers with a large grain of salt at the very least.
So these prices often reflect the few options that are (visibly) available for tourists.
Most tourists still pick one of the shitty providers available at the airport or train station and go with that. Some of them provide a faster verification do you can walk out having internet, in Austria if you buy internet at a supermarket (it's uncomplicated there) it can take a few hours to verify.
Or Italy, if you arrive in Venedig you find ads for internet packages everywhere. I actually needed to go to the mainland to buy a a normal SIM. As no one on the island acknowledged the cheaper packages available.
My point is, it's complicated
Source: I've spent months (if not years) with my laptop In Europe and Asia and internet always was the #1 priority. I also do not know if things are better today
They have short-term or no-contract options at low prices, and often have a website in English.
Also what is short? In Austria I get a new prepaid for every few days I stay (because uncomplicated and cheap). In the Netherlands libera was the only real option even thought I was there for 2 months.
Edit:// I spent over 200€ on prepaid internet that 2 months I was in the Netherlands. A always cancel contract would have costed I think about 20$ a month for unlimited (and way faster) internet
In the EU there are still some countries where you can buy SIM cards without ID so you can just order one of those online and then use roaming, which does not have additional charges within the EU.
Also roaming is a good point. 5 years ago when I was active travelling this was no option yet as only contracts had proper roaming. Cheap roaming in the EU is basically new, and some ex. Switzerland is mostly still excluded
At my rate, reddit.com should cost $0.0002363
Unrelated, wow, thank you for reminding me how badly we're getting screwed in Canada :). Approximately $90 CDN here for a 15GB soft-cap with "unlimited" slow usage beyond that.
These cost analyses are always popular for people to brag about how much cheaper their country's data plans or broadband speeds are, but I seriously doubt that many Canadian Redditors are paying $0.17 for every page load. Simply browsing the front page and clicking on a few comment sections could cost $10 or more. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
> Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios.
Which is... a weird statement. Best case scenario for what? The cheapest plan is the best case if you wanted to access the site once per billing period. But then price per visit is the cost of plan? I don't know what they're trying to say here.
Even additional data (if you go over plan limits), which is by far the most expensive way to get data, is less than that, it's $104 per GB with my provider.
The only thing required to buy a SIM is a passport so every foreigner can buy one.
Not a great deal if you ask me. For example Iliad is offering 120GB/€9.99.
By default, it shows the costs when using the cheapest post-paid plan with at least 500MB allowance for at least 30 days – cheapest in absolute terms, not per GB.
You can toggle the option to show prepaid plans with the same parameters (at least 500 MB for at least 30 days).
But since it takes data from the ITU and not from the real market, the numbers do indeed seem inflated. One of the cheapest (in absolute terms) prepaid plans for mobile internet in Germany is AldiTalk at 4€/1GB/4 weeks, so that the pageload should cost even less than 1ct (0.0056 EUR). Similarly, your Telekom plans are for 4 weeks. Maybe they've excluded these plan because it's not for at least 30 days.
If a service provider offers a $20/month plan with 500 MB of data, their $40/month plan will almost certainly offer a lot more than 1000 MB. The cheapest plans are usually designed specifically for people who don't plan to use a significant amount of data.
Two things:
1. The data is in the process of being updated. Prices change quickly and from the trend of past changes I fully expect these prices to drop as soon as I make the change.
2. While the ITU (and other data sources) try their best to look at all sources, I have to take them at their word. I've heard several times that they seem to have overlooked plan A or plan B, so it doesn't surprise me if there are other plans lurking out there.
Long-story short, it's absolutely best to consider this as a gauge/appromixation, rather than a scientific exact number.
The site also says "Prices were collected from the operator with the largest marketshare in the country" but follows it with "Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios." which doesn't logically follow. But going with that, the largest carrier in the US is apparently AT&T, and just the first plan on their site offers a 4GB plan at $50, or ≈$12.50 / GiB, which is an order of magnitude lower than the figure on the site?
For example your calculation is that 1.39 MB costs Canadians 0.17, that would mean 1 GB costs Canadians 125 US dollars. There isn't a single plan in Canada that charges 125 dollars for 1 GB of data.
This isn't just a minor inaccuracy of +/-10%, this is off by literally a factor that's closer to 15-20x.
> The Big 3 Canadian telecom companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) own 90% of the market and charge higher prices due to a lack of competition.
Just as an example, many tried to shorten the "month" to 28 days and they got a combined €228M fine in early 2020: https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/01/31/news/bollette_...
€228M for essentially a 7% hike in pricing.
Fixed lines, on the other hand, are fast, cheap and there's no data cap.
- Newspapers
- TV stations/channels
- Radio stations
- Content streaming services (a la Netflix)
- Land-based telco (phone, cable, fiber)
- Wireless telco
Each of the providers in Canada does all of those things to some degree or other and because they own news outlets they wield a lot of political influence. Combine that with the fact that most of the people who have been in charge of our telco regulator have ties to these media conglomerates, it becomes pretty clear it's a captured market. So much so that it's newsworthy when someone actually doesn't just rubber stamp everything[1]. It also means external competition is limited to being unprofitable, so newcomers who enter the market don't tend to stay long and generally just get bought out by the incumbents.
It's a mess and no political party seems to think it's an issue worth pursuing.
[1]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/c...
Here you get 20GB for 20 euro on prepaid with unlimited calling (which I never use at all - all my calls are on Whatsapp etc :') ). Or 5GB for 10 euro. I use the 20 euro plan as my 4G backup for when my fibre goes down and I worked a whole week off the 20GB during the first lockdown when there was such an issue (I do shut down some stuff like steam downloads and netflix with a script on my router when it's on failover). It really saved my bacon. The good thing about it is that it's even prepaid so I can just load money up on it when I need it.
Strange thing is, we have 3 mobile operators here too (not counting the many MVNOs). Shouldn't be a barrier to decent competition. If you have more than 3 the available radio spectrum starts getting diluted anyway.
(I don't really understand it though, because Freedom Mobile has agreements to roam on the other networks and while the cost is much increased, for people who leave the city once every month or two it doesn't add up to the cost of the more expensive providers. These days Freedom even includes some included roaming in their plans, presumable to help customers see this line of thinking.)
[1] It is also plausible they installed the tower to reduce the cost of phone service. There are cases where a microwave tower is necessary to deliver any communication service to the area, so the tower is already there to provide cellular service.
There was even a way to, say, register a phone number in Saskatchewan and use it in say Ontario, leveraging a cross-carrier agreement to basically use Rogers or Bell infrastructure at Sasktel prices. I think they found and closed this loophole, though.
When Wind was around, the Egyptian billionaire owner gave an interview saying that if he could take his entire investment out of Canada at a 10% haircut he would do it in an instant. Wind operates in 170 countries. He compared Canada to China and North Korea.
More here if you're bored. I would also say to Americans looking to move to Canada in light of... recent events, be prepared to be frustrated with the lack of choice in banks, telecom, grocery chains, and doctors. https://financialpost.com/telecom/tight-reins-leaves-our-tel...
And no, it's not an MVNO, I use Orange Spain. The tariff I mean in particular is "Go Fly": https://www.orange.es/tarifas/movil/prepago
It looks like they now upped the allowance to 65GB (35 standard and 30 as temporary "gift" :) ). Didn't even realise that. They often have temporary deals like that. I mainly use my work SIM in my phone.
I think there's even better deals available here in Spain but I use Orange because they have a cell on top of this building and the 4G coverage is full bars (high buildings around so the signal reflects back to me).
For a period of about two months I was tethering my smart TV to my phone while the broadband was being upgraded and was a bit shaky. I was using around 200GB a month.
I would never want to go back from unlimited.
MVNOs would only disrupt their ability to buy sports teams. This does come up in elections, but so far they have gotten away with window dressing.
Like the devastation it brought to all the other countries where it's been a success? :D
Sometimes I don't know how these lobbyists manage to make this stuff up.
The speeds are fast though so you can be sure when you tether just as MS Office is updating you run out of data in about a minute.
Google Fi (in the US, at least) is $10/GB. So 1000mb is $10, or $.01 per mb. It'd be only $.0139 on Fi.
That's quite a huge difference. The chart even says that US data would be $.09 which is still hugely different.
It claims to use the cheapest plan from the dominant carrier in the country. That doesn't mean that everyone is getting screwed like this, just most people.
They say they get the prices from ITU, but I don't know where on ITU they found that data, but I feel like maybe something is being used wrong.
For reference, I'm paying about $23/month for unlimited everything in NL. I'm pretty sure that's not even the cheapest plan you could get, I just haven't switched providers in a couple of years.
For example you might want to consider their current 10GB for $40 plan here: https://www.freedommobile.ca/en-CA/plans?planSku=Freedom%202... (note there are some conditions to get the full 10GB of data)
Mint Mobile in US is $15/4GB/mo , which is plenty for everything except extensive video chat/streaming movies.
Your deal seems far better than all the plans mentioned here:
It’s easier and cheaper to provide cellular service to dense populations like NL.
The population density of NL is over 100X more dense than Canada. Of course, once you exclude the largely uninhabited areas of Canada the difference isn’t as large, but it’s still significantly more costly to build cellular infrastructure across large and spread out places like Canada and the United States than smaller, densely populated places like NL.
Finland population density: 18 per km^2
Canada population density: 4 per km^2
Population density doesn't explain everything, but it's a big factor.
That would be harder, of course.
Providers in Canada are a cartel in every definition of the word. The three major cartel members can "compete" in a province and amazingly all have identically bad pricing and policies. Then they go to Quebec or Manitoba (or maybe it was Saskatchewan?) where there is a location-specific alternative and their pricing is significantly better.
Having said all of that, I should be fair and note that some of the providers have "infinity plans" now. So if you got a Rogers 5GB plan and have used 5GB by day one, you still have free data for the rest of the month at a speed of 512Kbps (again, amazingly all three of the major providers have identical policies). Which is still an entirely workable speed for a lot of things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Collines-de-l%27Outaouai...
The county I live in, is 2200 sq km, with a population density of 24/sq km. This is in Quebec, at 1.5M sq km in size, and beside one of the largest metro areas in Canada, the National Capital Region of Ottawa and Gatineau, 5th or 6th largest.
NL is 423/sq km density, 20x. It is only 40000sq km, or about 18x larger than my county.
Quebec is 35x larger, Canada 230? 240 times larger.
Further point, my municipality is in a populous province, and effectively a suburb of the nations capital.
Lots of places have far lower population densities, and we have parks, and counties larger than the Netherlands.
Lots more area to cover, for sure.
Bill pay plans end up way worse on the low end though. The cheapest bill pay plan from my provider is €40/month, only includes phones that are €30 outright, and comes with 20gb of data. A year or two ago it would have been €30/month with only 1gb of data included.
Also, I assume mobile networks are doing heavy QoS when towers get congested, where people who result in more profit for the mobile network get higher priority/more bandwidth.
It still ends up cheaper than our previous unlimited plan because we just make sure to use Wifi whenever possible.
Fi has an unlimited plan, but it costs more and it doesn't include roaming (outside of country) data.
We've got a huge credit because we got deals on a couple expensive phones, but after that credit runs out (in like a year, I think) we'll probably re-evaluate.
It always seemed like calling it "unlimited" was just boldly lying, especially when the limits are there in the fine print.
The policy makes sense to me.
I will be honest, it usually isn't too bad when I am in my work-home routine due to having Wi-Fi in most of places, but becomes quite obvious (and painful) once I travel.
It's not something I would recommend as a substitute for wifi, but definitely worth it if you travel to multiple countries, and don't want to deal with getting and/or swapping sims at every destination.
Why on Earth is it so expensive?
1.3mb seems optimised to me at first glance
VLC is one of the more complex programs out there, and yet the VLC binaries and the libvlc libraries they ship with total only 1.295 MiB on my computer.
The main application for Scid, a chess database program, is only 1.1 MiB. (The program also comes with a simple test chess engine and some opening books, so the overall package is somewhat larger.)
The binary and libraries for hexchat, an IRC application, total 1.22 MiB.
The program files for Pinta, an image editing program, come in right at 1.3 MB.
The vast majority of programs are under 10 MiB total. Moreover, I've tried to pick relatively full featured desktop apps, and desktop apps as a rule do more than any 1 MB web page. And these applications come in highly compressed archives, which means that their download size is often significantly less.
Furthermore, I would argue that web pages are rarely comparable to applications. When you're browsing Reddit, if the home page is 1.3 MiB on mobile, chances are the first individual post you click on is also going to be 1.3 MiB, and the one after that, and so on. You don't get the benefits of Reddit by downloading an "application" one time and getting tiny updates after that. If you're lucky most of the libraries being pulled in will get cached, but frequently it doesn't work out that way. On desktop Reddit, a warm refresh of the site still used more than 2.5 MiB for me, and that's with an ad blocker enabled.
Some of the cause of all this has to do with market forces and prioritizing speed of development over customer experience. But I don't think that's the whole story.
There's a furniture chain here that has a website so terrible, I just gave up on trying to buy what I wanted from them. So much happening in JavaScript to make things happen on the page. I have to imagine it's also terribly written, since it freezes up the tab most of the time, and Firefox suggests killing the script.
I have an extension on my Firefox to always load the old reddit. There is an account-specific setting to always load old reddit, but there are times when I browse without an account.
Now to accept cookie policies you need first to accept being redirected into the new site, and then manually return to old version.
I bet in about one year time the old is gone.
If you drop support for MSIE 11 and only support modern browsers the modern javascript is surprisingly compact.
But then your CV looks stupid: no frameworks on the list. How would you ever get a job again?
How do you get any respect if you say "I just code javascript directly on the browser", sounds like you're too stupid to learn a framework.
You will only get respect from the very best developers but not all the copy/paste 'developers', no respect from the HR department nor mediocre managers.
It's an uphill battle.
React is about 110kB. Vue is 33kB. It's perfectly possible (and really not that hard) to write fast, small web apps with the big popular JS frameworks. It's the thoughtless stuff people do—pulling in huge libraries for tiny features, mandating the use of huge analytics packages, etc—that cause the bloat.
Whether it should all just be server-rendered is a whole other argument, but if you're going to build something the size and scale of reddit as a client-rendered app, you'd be crazy to not use one of the existing frameworks IMO. If for no other reason than you're likely to end up just re-creating a worse version of them.
But a lot of the complaints in this thread boil down to modern sites being slow to run on computers that are only a few years old. If modern frameworks are to blame for that, it's not because they're a hundred (or more) KB. It's because they require the end user to run way more Javascript in the browser and consume far more memory than a site with minimal Javascript requires to accomplish the same thing.
As a random example, Firefox's about:performance page says that the three YouTube tabs I have open are each consuming about 50 MB of my computer's memory. That's obscene. (None of the tabs are open on a video, so this is not the result of storing videos in RAM.)
Also, I did a Lighthouse analysis of the Reddit home page in Chrome (on Desktop, but targeting mobile). The page scores less than 20/100 on performance, and takes almost twenty seconds to become interactive!! The biggest problem Lighthouse sees with the page is not the file size, but the amount of Javascript being executed. There's ~25 seconds of "main thread work" being done in my test.
On the contrary, I'm pretty sure you could make Reddit a usable site in everything down to text-based browsers (static HTML + small bits of JS), and still have it be faster and smaller than what the new version is today.
"Modern" development is a horrible bloated mess.
I agree with the rest of your comment, however; and perhaps the solution is to not hire only "web developers", as those whose full-time job isn't to work on that stuff seem to be far better at not adding "padding" for the sake of "CV-driven development", when they are actually asked to work on websites.
I've had a few experiences with that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23590137
My anecdotal guess is that the infrastructure costs are higher in Canada due to lower population density. Lots more area to cover to achieve the same coverage.
Other countries like Australia have similar densities and infrastructure costs yet still have way lower prices. The Canadian telecom industry is sheltered and there's really only 3 big players. Foreign competition isn't allowed so there's no possibility of Verizon or Vodafone coming in and shaking things up.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t... https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...
I'm not posting enough references here, but this whole conversation has been so limited in facts and proportion.
The point is the government wants carriers to provide service everywhere, which includes places like Nunavut, 0.019 persons per square mile.
There are local initiatives, and some are really fantastic, but it's difficult to bootstrap those everywhere.
Go to https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm and search for Nunavut and see who comes up.
These prices need to come down, more competition and local initiatives need to happen, and more innovation for systems like mesh networks. It is particularly upsetting when ways can't be found to share infrastructure. But if providing access to every Canadian is the goal (rather than for every person in a city at a cost less than a bag of groceries) there is probably some logic to the existing system.
Some people will say "just pay for Starlink everywhere," but it's really not ok for a country's access to be owned by another country (as long as Musk is still on earth), wired ultimately has advantages, and there are probably benefits to supporting wired infrastructure, and competition and choice are important.
The cost difference between Telstra and Telus/Bell/Rogers is double, but over a month tens of dollars is not a significant part of a budget, and when consuming video &c there's really not that much different between 30 - 40 GB (unlimited is another story). For people on a very limited budget, there are lower cost plans, but even with the Telstra plan it's not comparable to wired.
Don't get me wrong, I think Canada, right or wrong, coddles these big carriers as a defence against international players, which creates an uneven playing field here (sharing infrastructure at competitive rates seemed like a fair recourse). I am just trying to bring more perspective to the table than "Ontario has a high density so should be cheap," besides the obvious "we are not just talking about Ontario or Toronto here."
Wired is the real thing to discuss here, and what may get lost in the shuffle.
The population density of the areas people live (that actually have telco service) is much much much higher than 14 people per sq. km.
The Greater Toronto Area has a population density of 849/sq. km[1]. Why are its prices not lower than, or at least comparable to all of Europe?
Revolut had to quit the canadian market because of the cartel banks..
Both an indictment of general bloat and Canada data prices.
More interesting is how much it costs for people in poorer countries — Where the absolute value of visiting a site is less, but relative to income is far greater.
Understandably you don't see much about this online — people with expensive data plans don't use it all up complaining about it online.
In Poland it's around 0.25$ per GB for mobile networks. So 1MB is 0.00025$ and a visit to reddit according to the above calculations would be 0.0003475$.
The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective.
India has incredibly cheap data. While Mauritania has the most expensive in the world compared with the average income.
The prices in the US aren't actually a serious problem any longer (they were if you go back 10 years, before T-Mobile's climb changed the market). Americans can trivially afford it given their disposable incomes at the median are among the highest on the planet. US plan prices have declined over the past ten years in nominal terms, while inflation has eroded another 30% of the price. $50-$60 is a nearly meaningless part of the average person's monthly budget in the US now (the median full-time income is $50,000, and Americans have low taxes at the median, which is where the high disposable incomes come from). Nobody is better at wasting money than Americans, they're thrilled to do it, you can tell judging by how they so willingly vaporize their disposable income on consumer garbage. And US plans typically have plenty of data with them these days, whereas Canada gets the worst of both outcomes (terrible data packages and very high prices).
People come on HN and say things like: well I'm in Latvia and I pay €12 and get unlimited data. Well yeah, adjust that to the US and it's €48 (~$56). Now you've got a T-Mobile plan in the US at that price, so what. Or someone will say I'm in Britain and I pay £25; yeah that's not cheap either, that's about $50x when you adjust it to the US for USD and incomes.
I agree in general. I have added a 3rd line to my plan and am spending less than 1/3 of what I spent 10 years ago on 2 lines.
I pay $23 including taxes and fees for two unlimited Sprint lines.
Admittedly, one is the $15 Kickstart plan available for two weeks in June 2018, and the other is a free line that Sprint last year gave out to almost everyone with at least one paid line.
But if I didn't have such plans, I'd pay $25 (after joining a discount group, which is trivial) for unlimited prepaid service from Visible. Or $30 for unlimited from Mint. Etc., etc.
>People come on HN and say things like: well I'm in Latvia and I pay €12 and get unlimited data. Well yeah, adjust that to the US and it's €48 (~$56).
Correct. Further, that US plan provides service everywhere in the country, from San Diego to Portland (either one), from Seattle to Miami, from Honolulu to Anchorage to Charlotte. Yes, there are European mobile plans that also offer all-inclusive coverage across the continent, but the super-cheap plans that are cited in these sorts of discussions usually aren't among them.
There is one thing to note is that there are similar observations for other market segments like cars. People will pay up to 20% more for the same car in Canada vs. the US. I remember when I lived in Canada I saw multiple news segments with the gov't getting angry that Canadians were going to the US to buy new cars in order to save money. During one news segment, the Canadian car dealer being interviewed replied with "Canadians are just willing to pay more," when asked why cars are more expensive in Canada.
> "Prices were collected from the operator with the largest marketshare in the country, using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days. Prices include taxes. Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios."
I disagree that it is necessarily the "best case" but it is a sensible way to count. Depending on the specific offering you may get unexpected results. For example, the 500MB plan may be barely cheaper than a 10GB plan, which can make sense if with that 500MB you are mostly paying for phone calls and SMS. Heavy internet users will most likely pick a plan with much more data that will be more expensive per month, but way cheaper per byte.
Also, it is split into two section: prepaid and postpaid, and Canada is at $0.07 postpaid. They just picked the highest number on the list.
You have it backwards. The chart says $0.17 postpaid, $0.07 prepaid.
The chart implies a cost of 120 USD per GB, which implies it's based on a 500MB/month plan costing 60 USD. There's no way in hell the cheapest way to get 500MB in Canada costs 60 USD. I'm in Canada and I pay 40 USD for 8GB per month.
The only way I figure they can get to such an absurd number is that no one sells 500MB plans in Canada anymore, so they had to choose a zero data plan + 500MB of additional data to make up a "500MB" plan. With my carrier, additional data is 104 USD per GB.
It wold be nice to see Facebook offering a few pennies for the marketing data we pay to give them. It would be nice to be paid for high ranking comments too. Say for instance, a guy writes a researched answer to a question on Reddit, and it blew up. Reddit would pay pay that individual a few dimes. The quality of comments would probally increase? Maybe less bathroom humor, and real thoughtful answers?
Could anyone imagine if we got a bill at the end of the month detailing what we pay per website/download incident?
You went to facebook 40 times, at a bandwidth, or percentage you pay us, at a cost of $6.00
You went to Reddit 30 times, at a cost of $3.00
(It will never happen because the big players are becoming very good Lobbiest's. If it ever did happen, I can guarantee, there would be no bloat. If it ever did happpen, it might redispute some if the obsence profits these guys hide? I still think most people would cheerily contribute to sites they respect without any form of enticement.)
They say it's "best case" but that appears to be based on the minimum hurdle to get a data plan, rather than the minimum data price.
I think a better measurement would be a range based on a few different price levels (cheapest/most expensive/modal) but I understand that would be much harder to implement.
Eg. Ask 100 citizens how many gb's they have and how much they pay. Calculate cost per gb for each. Take median.
> using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days
Is just rubbish.
It's just impossible to price things like this, take EE's pricing per GB for a 1 month sim:
* 1GB - £14 - £14 per GB
* 120GB - £20 - £0.16p per GB
* 10GB - £20 - £2 per GB
* 200GB - £23 - $0.115p per GB
* Unlimited - £35
The total price of the cheapest contract is £6 cheaper than the next step up, which is 100 times cheaper per GB.
And this conclusion is the opposite:
> Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios.
They are the worst case scenarios at the very least in Brazil where I have purchased such packages
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
Fizz for example is for Quebec subscriber only (but offer coverage over the whole country). It's still quite expansive per GB if you get the smallest amount of data, but still you would get for 16$ CAD per month for a 1 GB mobile plan. That means 0.0178$, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than what they said.
I don't know how they got their price, that's really not clear from their page. Canada is a HUGE country, there's not a single provider that has an unique price for the whole country. Some province get far cheaper price for many different reasons (competitive market, population density, type of users, etc...). Even the big providers doesn't keep the same price in every province.
The Free Mobile team email me every couple of years to tell me that my mobile 50GB limit has gone up to 100GB and then transformed into unlimited data. I don’t think I’ve ever gone over about 40GB on mobile, anyway, and a lot less than that in the pandemic - but good to know I don’t have to think about it.
Out of the countries listed, I only have recent experience with the U.S. It says $0.09 for 1.39MB using "the least expensive plan with a minimum data allowance of 500MB over a minimum of 30 days". That works out to $30.6-$34.2 for a 500MB plan. I'd say the pricing data is several years out of date.
I know there are folks that defend it and possibly enjoy it, but I think they have somehow built the muscle memory to not fuck up and accidentally look the wrong way while browsing.
In India, it costs me 7.43 USD for 84 days of 1.5GiB high-speed 4g data per day (plus unlimited calling). After that it drops of to a lower speed, but you can top off cheaply.
That's $0.058 per GiB or $0.00005 per MiB
We've reverted the title as the site guidelines ask:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
How many people even need that much? In the UK I would guess most people are on 1-3GB plans; these cost <£10pcm.
Edit: or maybe I'm horribly out of touch? In the age of TikChat and Snapstagram, maybe most people (shudders) need 'unlimited'/lots more than that?
The <20£ plans often have caps but it's not so much more for unlimited.
The killer in Canada (at least, from the big two providers I checked above) seems to be that low-limit plans aren't available. They start at 30GB, and charge roughly double.
I get 160GB 5G with EE for £20/month but it's a much better network.
Pathetic? Sure. But just don't use mobile data unless you need it. 250MB is enough for data plan based messaging, Strava, Google Maps (with cached maps) and whatever information you need to look up. You don't really need to watch 1080p streaming video outside the house.
If anything this actually encourages healthy phone habits.
If you do need massive data, suck it up, pay the CAD $80/month for the big data package, then the incremental cost of visiting a given web site is zero.
Cheaper? Look it up. It's Public Mobile prepaid. $15/month minus $2 for autopay (which everyone uses), minus $1/month for every year you've been on to a maximum of 5, minus $1/month for every referred friend (or spouse!) that is currently using it. I think the wife and I together are running at $21 or $22 per month currently.
Yes, would be nice to have dirt cheap internet and mobile data, but we don't. So make the best of what we do have.
"Just don't use it, plus good phone habits"
What about value added uses for the phone? I looked up how to harvest basil today and watched a 60 second YouTube video. Or reading an encyclopedia. Or fixing a car.
None of those are bad phone habits. And those previously mentioned don't necessarily have the luxury of wifi.
I find it super annoying that low bandwidth information (i.e. a paragraph or two of text) has been replaced by ad-riddled Youtube videos! I've been able to avoid this usage pattern while on mobile data, but I can see that not everyone feels they can.
Wikipedia is lightweight, no problem on frugal data.
>"Just don't use it, plus good phone habits"
Agreed. For a couple of years I had 1-5GB mobile plans, often free (thanks to the late great RingPlus). I never used more than 1-2GB a month so they were quite sufficient for my needs.
I then got unlimited service from Sprint (thanks to the late great free unlimited year offer). My usage patterns did not change. To my surprise, however, I found that no longer having to think about the usage limit—even if the limit was never a real problem before—perceptibly eased my daily life.
Thanks, super useful, now I know I gotta work on some assets optimization.
- [1] https://rdddeck.com
- [2] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240...
By this point ads, and the tracking scripts associated with ad networks, have grown so large that they may cost more in bandwidth than they generate in sales. People are famously hesitant to pay for content, but in this case it’s “free” if it means dumping the ads.
In most of the rest of the world, when you run out of data the only website you can access is your bank to make another payment to the phone company...
It bothers me that many similar websites (i.e. text content) load 2-5 MB of data for just text on a page. Pretty much everything past the first few kilobytes are useless to the reader.
These websites fall apart when you're not on a recent Macbook with a wired gigabit connection. Developers forget that people browse the web in the subway, on intercity trains and on crappy hotel/airport internet.
The cost of using different sites on mobile networks around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192503 - April 2017 (90 comments)
What Does My Site Cost? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9187128 - March 2015 (1 comment)
I use a telephone plan that gives 1GB/day for 3 months for 8USD. That comes to around $0.0001 cents per MB.
Really, though, I’m part of the problem. The product I’m working on is a heavy JavaScript-based content editor. It’s definitely a much better UX than the lighter weight previous version. But we made the user-facing content pages Preact-based simply to keep our stack consistent. We’re a small team, and that’s been a real time saver.
Hopefully, we’ll get around to optimizing things in the future, but it’s not something anyone other than the dev team cares about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#Uni...
By "unlimited" you mean an unlimited plan that does not throttle/deprioritize after ~50GB of usage, right?
I pay $23 a month for two Sprint unlimited lines, but both deprioritize after 50GB (although I think I only exceeded 10GB a month once for unusual circumstances, and I hear that in many places deprioritization never happens anyway). On the other hand, there is no obstacle to my purchasing and swapping in a 5G phone on those lines.
That is a wildly incorrect claim. The only people I know on limited data plans are elderly. Everyone else is either on a cheap, slow unlimited plan or an expensive, fast unlimited plan. Even if I count my deprioritization quota of 22GB as my "limit" visiting Reddit only costs me 0.16 cents.
Further, I bet that 10GB is effectively equivalent to unlimited for 90% of people.
At this point, I can't even treat Reddit like a collection of community forums anymore... They make it impossible to read a thread when you come in from a Google result (unless you know the cheat code, change www in the url to old) and their content filtering is something out of a dystopian novel written by a schizophrenic bot. Trying to find any specific piece of info? Good luck.
Its Hong Kong not Honk Kong
This means on that continent at least unneeded JS in web pages is literally AIDS.