
The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020) - vanilla-almond
https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/
======
amingilani
Not all Internet experiences are equal though. 1 GB of internet in Pakistan
($0.69) ≠ 1 GB of internet in Canada ($12.55). I would gladly trade my
Pakistani internet plan for my Canadian internet plan.

Last month, when I was in Pakistan, my experience was:

\+ highly censored to the point where even services like Cloudflare's edge-
node's within the country were being MiTM-ed by the censors [0];

\+ I couldn't use "any mode of communication such as VPN by means of which
communication becomes hidden or encrypted is a violation of PTA regulations"
in the words of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authoruty (PTA) —Pakistan's
FCC-equivalent. I asked them if TLS/SSL was included but they never tweeted
back; and

\+ I didn't have access to services like Paypal, and when a service hadn't
rolled out "globally", it wasn't available to me.

Oh, and while I had "unlimited" internet, I was subject to my carrier's "Fair
Use Policy" which had an unspecified maximum download limit after which your
internet would be cut off. This was reported by a lot of people during the
initial work-from-home boost during the pandemic when home-data-usage spiked.

Now that I'm in Canada, my internet is nearly unrestricted.

Edit: previous said my ISP restricted IRC. Just rechecked, it no longer does.

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/amingilani/status/1283448960666009601](https://twitter.com/amingilani/status/1283448960666009601)

~~~
guidedlight
Yes, but you are clearly cherrypicking data.

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.

~~~
filmgirlcw
> Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst
> the fastest in the world.

Really? That hasn’t been my experience — and granted I’ve never lived in
Australia or spent much time out of Sydney but I was there for 10 days in
February and even though I paid for 4G Plus or whatever Optus calls LTE,
speeds weren’t even comparable to what I can get in the US and were truly
behind what I got in Seoul (where I was right after I was in Sydney). The only
research I’ve seen that indicates Australia is amongst the fastest comes from
research that is based on maximum speeds, not average speeds.

I can appreciate that Australia has robust cellular networks (assuming the
user doesn’t live somewhere where they are forced to use satellite), in part
because home internet speeds are so poor, but I wouldn’t put it in even the
top 10 of parts of the world I’ve visited for internet speeds.

~~~
icanhackit
> whatever Optus calls LTE

Optus is terrible. It's worth paying a slight premium for Telstra 4G. I'm on a
45gb cell phone plan for AUD$60 and it works everywhere, even in tunnels or
remote areas, with speeds that shame my Fibre To The Building connection
(though not in latency). My work laptop uses Optus and regularly loses
connection despite being in an inner city suburb and close to a cell tower.

------
henrikf
If I understand the methodology correctly this study seems to penalize
unlimited plans quite a lot. In the linked methodology pdf they specify that
the price for 1 GB of data for unlimited plans is calculated by dividing by
the average data usage per user but limited plans are divided by the limit.

For example in Finland almost all plans are unlimited and users regularly use
a lot of mobile data. Average monthly use is 34 GB and median 6 GB [0]. The
cheapest mobile plan I can find is 9.90€/month for unlimited data at 1 Mbit/s
[1]. Dividing it by 6 GB median data use gives $1.95 for 1 GB which is close
to the their reported minimum price of $1.75. However if this plan was instead
marketed with 100 GB monthly cap they would have divided it by 100 GB instead
giving a much cheaper price.

[0] [https://blog.telegeography.com/finns-lead-the-way-in-
mobile-...](https://blog.telegeography.com/finns-lead-the-way-in-mobile-data-
usage) [1]
[https://elisa.fi/kauppa/puhelinliittymat](https://elisa.fi/kauppa/puhelinliittymat)

~~~
iagovar
We also have "unlimited" plans in Spain, however at +40€ typically, and under
"fair use" use clauses.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
The question is always what fair use is. Phone contracts with unlimited data
set the fair use clause in Austria to 1.5TB a month and have no such
limitation for data only sim cards (home use).

On the other hand unlimited in Germany often means ISDN speeds after 50GB.

~~~
hans_0l0
I live in Switzerland and we have quite a lot of unlimited plans without speed
limit after a certain amount of data. Also the price in relation to income is
not that high. If I compare it to Germany, where you can get no real unlimited
plan and very often have a bad signal even in cities, and also in relationship
to the income there, Germany seems to earn a place much lower on the list. So
this comparison seems a bit odd, and should be divided into prepaid plans with
limited data packages and unlimited plans.

------
inglor
Israeli here, pay 7$ for 200GB of data (well I pay 14$ for 400GB and use one
as home internet backup because it is cheap).

It used to be quite expensive here at around $100/mo for 10GB but the
government broke up the monopoly and forced competition into the market by
making existing players share infrastructure. We went up from main 3 providers
to around 10 and prices dropped sharply.

My government screws up quite a lot in my opinion but credit is due and that
reform was quite successful.

~~~
ars
In Israel the caller pays for a mobile call, while in other countries the
owner of the mobile pays.

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.

~~~
andi999
I do not understand this. Does that mean in israel the callee pays (as well,
or completely) and in other countries (only) the caller?

Or does it mean you share mobile phones and in other countries the owner of
the mobile phone pays while in Israel the callers somehow identify on the
phone?

~~~
gingerlime
I'm not sure I understand what the GP is trying to say (especially since the
article focuses on mobile Internet, rather than calls).

Just to clarify: only the caller pays for outbound calls in Israel. The
receiver never pays for receiving a call. This is also true to all EU
countries as far as I'm aware.

------
makecheck
One of the things that frustrates me about apps/web is that most people have
no idea what individual apps/sites are “costing” them. Without additional
tools and watching Cellular Data settings like a hawk, stupid things can
_slurp up_ your data plan.

Entire books could be sent to people in a sane format but a 3-line web page
wrapped in garbage takes dozens of megabytes? An app that does “very little”
is consuming 100 MB in no time?

Worse, no one seems to want to “pay” for apps anymore (demanding everything be
free) but then they blow $10 on data because their “free” app is routinely
shoving unnecessary amounts of data to their device.

We need some _hard_ limits on data; if I give your app 100 K, you shouldn’t be
able to use any more. Furthermore, the default data limits should be very low
(with big scary dialogs appearing when apps request more) to discourage lazy
designs that offload their true costs onto unsuspecting consumers.

~~~
megous
At $35 per gigabyte, visiting a badly written website could cost $0.5 just for
opening a home page.

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.

~~~
aembleton
Or you could limit the size of media elements
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-
switches#no-...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-
large-media-elements)

~~~
megous
That probably only works if the remote sends the content-length header, right?
Or will it also terminate requests that simply keep loading past the 50kiB or
whatever mark?

Anyway, looks like a reason to use Firefox on mobile. :)

~~~
aembleton
> That probably only works if the remote sends the content-length header,
> right?

Correct: "If the media elements do not have Content-Length header present,
then this switch will fail to block the said media elements by size."

Source: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-
switches#no-...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-
large-media-elements)

------
nabla9
The Great Reversal -How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon
[https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237544](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237544)

The Economist: [https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2019/12/12/a...](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2019/12/12/are-anti-competitive-firms-killing-american-innovation)

Article by Philippon:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/europe-
not...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/europe-not-america-
home-free-market/600859/)

"Chapter 8 How European Markets Became Free" Is funny story how EU
accidentally tricked itself into creating competitive markets for products and
services.

EU governments have tradition of protecting their own economies and shaping
their industrial policy as they have done in the past. Distrust between
countries led to the only working solution: independent regulators and fair
markets. Ruhr Authority in 1949 was already independent from from the control
of any European country but it took several decades for Europe to create
broad, independent, and powerful regulators.

And the results are clear: EU has state aid rules for example, the US does
not. In the US corporations have incentive to shop around for subsidies,
pitting one state against another and leading to inefficient outcomes.

------
nippoo
I've been amazed at the effects of this every time I've visited India. With
data so cheap, social media use is prolific - people share videos and stream
all day long - and public WiFi is far less commonplace since essentially
/everybody/ owns phones with almost unlimited data plans.

India still has a long way to go in terms of social equality, poverty and
breaking up the caste system, but providing fast, cheap Internet for all is
undoubtedly a great first step.

~~~
geodel
Sorry, But I have seen the opposite effect of cheap internet there. People
spend lot of time in spread hatred, fake news and animosity using internet
service.

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.

~~~
Sebb767
This might be true (it appears we have similar people in the western world).
However, I think you're being downvoted because it seems you're advocating
less internet access in the hopes of more equality.

It brings up an interesting question, though: Assuming for the moment that
internet access actually increases hatred - is more hate towards a group a
good tradeoff for empowering them by giving them internet access as well?

~~~
geodel
You are right. I could have worded differently to not imply that less internet
is better. Point is that better internet connectivity lead to better social
outcomes at large is wishful thinking.

------
qalmakka
I'm Italian and I pay ~9 euros per month for 130 GB of uncapped 4G mobile
Internet, so I can't really complain about it. Some new offers I've seen are
as low as 6.99 for 100 GB + infinite calls. A few days ago I told this to a
friend of mine who lives in the UK and he was shocked because he pays a lot
more for like 2GB a month.

I guess healthy competition can really be good for consumers when it works as
it is supposed to.

~~~
StavrosK
Meanwhile, Greece with its telecom cartel is a few spots from last, with such
good company as Turkmenistan, the Virgin Islands and, for some reason, Canada.

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

~~~
spapas82
What's more funny to the Greek mobile internet comedy (or maybe drama for us
greeks) is that before 1 year, after the elections, the new prime minister
asked nicely the telecom operators to offer cheaper mobile internet. The
operators agreed of course.

The result? There were some mocking offers in the form of double GB for the
same price right after the meeting (ie instead of 10 euros/1 gb you'd get 10
euros/2 gb). After 1 year nothing more. The telecom operators think that we
are in the 2000 where mobile internet is something that only company
executives need...

I think the time has come for the government to stop asking nicely for cheap
mobile internet and force the operators to align with the rest of Europe.

~~~
simonklitj
What's the possibility of buying a cheap data SIM-card in Bulgaria (or
somewhere else) and using the EU-roaming laws to get cheap data in Greece?

------
MayeulC
This data is worthless and likely very skewed by the use of mean prices
instead of the median, while not displaying the standard deviation.

Take France, for instance. 42 plans. 0.11 for the cheapest. 108 for the most
expensive. How the hell are they finding 0.81 average, BTW? Same with South
Korea.

Also, in my experience, the bigger the plan, the less expensive it is, so they
should have sorted "per 1 GB/month plan" or controlled for that issue somehow.

~~~
fireattack
> How the hell are they finding 0.81 average

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

~~~
makapuf
Which is not reality, if there were 1$, 100$ and 200$ you wouldn't say the avg
person would pay 100.

~~~
pavanky
Thats not what they said. If it was the average, the sum of all plans (42 @
0.81) would be 34.02 which is less than the most expensive plan at 108.

~~~
makapuf
Avg would be 100.3, but médian would be 100.

------
maple3142
Taiwanese here, I think Taiwan's data is inaccurate. Our mobile carriers have
a "unlimited" plan, which you can actually use unlimited data. The price of
the plan varies a lot, but my unlimited plan only costs 499TWD/m(16.9USD/m),
and I use nearly 50GB per mounth. But I'd like to mention there is no such as
unlimited texts here, only unlimited data. I think this is why SNS is
preferred over SMS and iMessage.

~~~
bhahn
Hmm, that’s interesting. Why is there no unlimited texting?

~~~
qalmakka
Here in Italy lots of plans actually stopped offering unlimited SMS because
nobody uses them anymore. I think I must have sent less than 10 SMS in the
last 5 years or so.

~~~
nottorp
SMS is the backup if all of the data using messengers fail. They generally
don't.

In Romania everyone is on Whatsapp. It has basically replaced text messages.

Actually, any widespread messaging app is better than the original text
messages. And don't even get me started on MMS.

------
tbronchain
This study is great, as it points out huge disparities that are more than
often not justified.

People have mentioned it and sometimes opening to competition have made huge
changes on the market. Take France for example, people used to pay around
$10/GB not so long ago. A new player came on the market and yes, didn't have
the same quality of service at first, but clearly cut the price and now a GB
is 10x cheaper. Better, they now provide unlimited data for ~20$/month (!!).
As some have also mentioned, unlimited is something clearly missing as it can
make the price/GB completely meaningless in some cases. I currently live in
Georgia and at the moment there are plans for ~1.5$/week for truly unlimited
data - speed is also great with ~50-100mbps and I live in a metropolitan,
dense area.

A last point is roaming. This is where I believe most unfairness lies with big
profits and ridiculous disparities. Some carries will charge $100+/GB for
roaming. Sometimes could even be $1000+(!!!) if you didn't think of buying a
plan. But in the other hand, using my French simcard (the one with unlimited
data for $20) I can get 25GB in most countries in the world (that include all
Europe, USA, Canada, China, Australia, etc.) And that's sometimes cheaper than
local plans. Sometimes even better as it gives me the ability to switch
between networks when coverage is low.

I know from friends who have been working in the industry that, prior the
shake in France, carriers used to sit back and relax while making tremendous
profits. There has been cases of illegal agreements between the 3
"competitors"/actors. Having a new actor and real competitor breaking the
prices didn't slow down network quality and growth, btw.

Why not letting carriers from other countries propose roaming plans to people
worldwide, regardless of your country of residence? That would become
interesting...

~~~
BrandoElFollito
When that new operator started (Free Mobile), it had had already
revolutionized fixed internet.

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.

------
chousuke
How do they measure unlimited plans? I've never had to pay attention to
traffic metering since in Finland virtually all operators offer unlimited
data.

I seem to use about 100GB a month at worst which would put the price at around
30 cents per GB on my rather overspecced 150Mb/s 4g plan.

~~~
unnouinceput
I don't know, it seems stuff like this are outliers. My country has the same -
1GBps/5G plan and when in middle of nowhere (like in vacation with kids at
their grandparents in the country side), missing a broadband connection we all
use hotspot from mobile, with easily using 50GB/day at least. And for 5
euro/month subscription that gives like 5 / (30 x 50) => 0.(3) cents per GB.

------
martinmunk
I’m in Denmark. I have “3” as a phone provider and have essentially an
unlimited plan for 30usd, with free roaming in most of the world. My home
internet is served as an IOT plan with a “300MB” plan that in practice the
network owned by the old national provider don’t cap, so I hit 1TB on 4G with
a monthly fee of ~4.7USD. I know many people who does the same. The US really
seem like in need of some good old competition.

~~~
onemiketwelve
Could a random person show up in Denmark and buy this plan? That sounds
amazing

~~~
Leherenn
I don't know about Denmark in particular, but in other EU countries they
stipulate you have to spend the majority of time/data in the "home" country or
the expensive roaming fees apply.

Not idea whether they actually check/apply this though.

------
pw6hv
I am wondering how did they get their data especially for Switzerland. Here
most of the plans have unlimited GB, so getting the price of a single one is
quite tricky.

Also, looking at the price for the most expensive one (~50USD) makes me think:
did they maybe just took the price of an unlimited plan and used that as price
for a GB?

Lastly, average in this analysis does not really make sense to me. Especially
as some very expensive plans can skew it to very large values.

~~~
uallo
> I am wondering how did they get their data especially for Switzerland. Here
> most of the plans have unlimited GB, so getting the price of a single one is
> quite tricky.

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.

~~~
pw6hv
Thanks for the observation.

Still I do not understand how would they have extrapolated price per GB when
considering an unlimited plan. Can that be that they just took the price of
the unlimited plan and assumed that's the price of 1GB? That would not be
wrong, but a bit deceiving to say the least. Otherwise I would not know how
the max price is ~50USD. Swisscom gives me ~15CHF per 1GB, and that is usually
seen as the most expensive company.

~~~
uallo
They attached a description of their methodology in the "Resources" section.

------
soneca
I believe the data should add the comparison using purchase power parity. The
price in USD being higher in the US than in Brazil doesn’t mean that the
internet is more expensive in the US

~~~
smabie
That doesn't make any sense, PPP is used to come up with "real" exchange rates
based on price differentials. If you used PPP as the exchange, all countries
would have the exact same price per GB.

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.

~~~
goshx
Something is cheap or expensive in each country based on what % of the salary
of a person living in those countries a good or service costs. Converting to
USD and assuming that it looks cheap to an american is silly.

~~~
smabie
Sure, that's a fair point, but that has nothing to do with PPP. PPP is about
exchange rates, not about goods.

------
emptysongglass
This is a little off-tangent but as a newly repatriated Dane, can another Dane
explain to me how we manage to both have a mega-monopoly telco in TDC and yet
have such good prices on internet and phone plans?

The only ISPs available to me at my home here are all wholly owned
subsidiaries of TDC: none of the others want to touch my address. That sounds
like exactly the "any color you want so long as its black" choice I so enjoyed
in the US.

How does Denmark do this? What is the special sauce?

~~~
klausjensen
Fierce competition, really. Many mobile companies competing - some even loss
leaders, who are then bought up by one of the giants for their customers. And
switching providers is pretty easy, so people shop around. This has driven
down prices.

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.

------
jakub_g
Kyrgyzstan is in top 3 cheapest. I've been there hiking last year and was mind
blown. We've bought a local SIM card + several GB of data for ~1USD. Then we
went hiking and in a village which is hiking base, in the "middle of nowhere",
at 3000m altitude, we had 20 Mbps LTE connection.

------
thom
I worked on a project for a major telco who regularly struggled with customer
bill shock. Business travellers would go abroad, run up bills without knowing
it (literally tens of thousands of pounds) and then complain that the provider
never warned them or set a cap. Often the provider would have to eat the cost
(it wasn’t massive markup, these were just the underlying trunk costs). We
spent a long time building alerting and monitoring tools, which would even
lock out your 3G dongle if you’d spent too much.

Unfortunately for us (but fortunately for customers) the EU introduced
legislation to cap this spend and things have been pretty good since then in
those parts of the world. I’m hoping UK customers don’t go back to the old
days post Brexit. I do some business in Egypt and it was my first experience
in a decade of actually having to worry about it and wasn’t prepared at all.

~~~
Tijdreiziger
For this reason I'm with a telco that just locks me out when I reach my cap.
The only thing I can do at that point is purchase an add-on package (which is
good for the rest of the month) and then the internet is turned back on. When
outside the EU, it locks me out by default unless I purchase an international
data package.

------
notRobot
I don't understand, why is it that it costs less than $1 in countries in Asia
for a GB of mobile data but costs ~$15 for the same in the United States?

Can someone with knowledge of the industry please explain the reasons for this
discrepancy to me?

~~~
jzwinck
Cellular service clearly can be delivered more cheaply in poor countries.
Telenor for example is Noweigian (very wealthy country) but offers service at
lower prices in Myanmar.

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.

~~~
MAGZine
Can you point to a source that says labour costs are the reason for high Telco
prices? The ongoing maintainence of a tower seems like it would be fractional
to operational cost.

~~~
jzwinck
Of course towers are a fraction of operating expenses. It was just an example
of one piece of the puzzle. All labor costs in Myanmar are far lower, from
marketing to lawyers to retail store staff.

And as I said, there are other reasons such as consumer surplus (rich people
can pay more, so they do).

------
mythz
When leaving Australia in 2005, it had one of the worst value mobile/internet
plans, was pleasantly surprised returning after 15 years to find it now offers
some of the best value.

Currently on a Woolworths no-contract pre-paid mobile, A$150 for 12 months for
84GB Data / unlimited mobile/SMS [1].

Works out as USD $8.95 /mo for 7GB / unlimited calls/SMS

[1] [https://mobile.woolworths.com.au/Shop/Plans/Woolworths-
Phone...](https://mobile.woolworths.com.au/Shop/Plans/Woolworths-Phone-
Plans/c/postpaid?default=starterpackplans)

~~~
ouchjars
We've come a long way from $20,000 per GB (the rate on Telstra prepaid circa
2011, as I discovered when I put my SIM into my first smartphone).

------
franciscop
This is an amazing visualization and clearly shows what I found while
traveling through Asia. Would love to see this mixed with average salary per
country, which I expect will show an inverse correlation.

~~~
llsf
Even European countries are generally cheaper then US when it comes to mobile
internet. E.g. France is 10 times cheaper on average. While France minimum
hourly wage is $11.83 and US minimum hourly wage is between $7.25 to $14.00
(depending on state). It seems that US is a bit expensive regardless of the
salary. Mobile companies are very competitive in Europe, and European
regulations put fuel on the fire by making the number portability mandatory
very early. Reducing the friction to change mobile operator while keeping the
same number and with minimum to no downtime.

------
rsynnott
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).

~~~
georgiecasey
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.

~~~
rsynnott
> 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.

------
grecy
I drove around Africa from mid 2016 to mid 2019[1]. I bought a SIM in most of
the 35 countries I went to, uploaded YT vids, hi-res photos and just video
chatted family. Overall the 3G connectivity was impressively fast, and almost
always a fraction of the price of Canada or the US.

Overall, I was extremely impressed.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX1gG0CUhHCsad_hv2qZbGzXc)

~~~
pier25
Woah that's quite an adventure!

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

Tunisia is a great country to visit.

~~~
grecy
It was always my dream to complete the loop, but the situation just didn't
allow it.

It is impossible to get a visa for Libya, and with the ongoing civil war the
safety situation is B.A.D. Even if I got a visa, the Egyptian military
wouldn't let me get anywhere NEAR the border. They're extremely protective of
tourists and won't let them go anywhere "dangerous". They also wouldn't let me
drive the Sinai over to Isreal.

Also, the border from Algeria into Morocco has been closed for years, and
nobody could tell me what would happen if I showed up and tried to cross.

So, unfortunately Egypt was the end of the line on that one!

~~~
sgt
Have you watched Motonomad? I guess Adam Riemann was lucky with the timing
being allowed into Sinai.

~~~
grecy
A motorbike is usually OK on the Sinai.

Funny enough, for the Sinai they don't care about _me_ being kidnapped, they
care about my Jeep being kidnapped and used by ISIS against them. So a good
vehicle like my Jeep is not allowed across the Sinai, but they don't care too
much (or at least you can talk your way through) on a motorbike.

~~~
sgt
Interesting!

------
Thaxll
Canada #209 out of 228 I'm not surprised, CRTC is useless, mobile / internet
is still crazy expensive in 2020.

~~~
donmcronald
Weird how Harper and Trudeau both promised to address it and we got nothing.

------
tjbiddle
American living in Indonesia here.

I never bother to purchase actual "minutes" on my local SIM. Instead I just
buy pure data plans and run everything through there. I usually just load up
~14GB for $7 which lasts 30 days - it could be even cheaper if I bought more
in bulk, but I never need it. Almost all of my communication is done over
WhatsApp, and when I need to call an actual number I use Google Voice /
Hangouts which which is over data and has very cheap minutes.

In comparison, whenever I visit the US I pop in my T-Mobile SIM and buy a
prepaid plan from them for a month. I think it's usually ~$50-70/mo.

A lot of my family is on Google Fi and said I should switch over since it's
"So easy for my international travels" but it just makes zero sense. If I pop
over to another country it's very simple to just buy a local SIM at the
airport and I'm good to go.

------
chatman
I'm in India and I pay $8 for 84 days and get 2.5GB/day for those 84 days.

~~~
YetAnotherNick
Just to add, while technically it's 4G, it's hard to rely on that and most of
the time the speed I get is less than 2-3mbps and the connection is really
unstable(lived in multiple places all across India). It was much better when
jio was just launched due to less users. But now it has become race to the
bottom and there is no way to get a good 4G connection in India.

~~~
ramraj07
At least where I live (or honestly wherever I've been in South India) Jio has
been mostly reliable enough for me to even work remotely with zoom calls and
ssh/slack. So YMMV is the real conclusion.

~~~
perryizgr8
I second this. My Jio connection is fast enough for me to VPN in and work,
combined with Zoom calls. It's always 20-30Mbps whenever I test it.

------
gattacamovie
From what we can see in many of the comments, the research is deeply flawed.
E.g. In Roumania with 6e you get over 50gb. Actually Digi(RDS), telco has 4$
subsription with 100gb lte plus additional 50gb 3G (total 150gb)/month. As for
the speed, Bucharest was found the best internet connection in the world for
games (a research released few days back). Thanks to the EU roaming law, some
people realized that it's so good that you can use it anywhere in Europe long
term (years, without going back to Romania). Subscribe in ro with the smallest
plan 4$/month, and enjoy 1.7e/Gb anywhere in Europe, as long as you want!!!
This is only for Digi (not organge/vodafone/tmobile). ONLY Digi allows you to
stay long term in roaming (years). Here are full prices(use google translate):
"Tarifele de roaming, cu TVA inclus, care se aplica de la primul min/MB/SMS
utilizat sunt: apeluri locale si catre tari UE/SEE 0.0183 Euro/min; catre alte
tari 1.4875 Euro/min si 0.0060 Euro/SMS trimis. Apeluri primite 0.0094
Euro/min si 0 Euro/SMS primit. Trafic date 0.0017 Euro/Mbyte. Apeluri gratuite
in UE/SEE: 112 (Urgenta) si +40314007777 (info tarife). Multumim, echipa
DIGI." So, if you are anywhere in Europe with higher than 1.7e/gb, make a Digi
subscription and you all set.

------
RantyDave
Yeah, this isn't right. I pay (New Zealand) a hundred and something a month
for 100GB 4G or 5G if you can get it.

~~~
nisse72
Sounds a bit high? Vodafone NZ offers 300 GB of 4G broadband for $73 at the
moment.

~~~
RantyDave
That's just broadband though. My phone is my sole internet connection these
days. We live in the future.

~~~
nisse72
My phone has also been my sole internet connection for the last 12 years.

What I don't get is they are selling wireless broadband at the price I mention
above, but if you buy what is essentially the same product as part of a phone
plan instead (i.e. they've simply packaged it differently), you pay something
along the lines of 10x or 20x the price per GB.

------
ezoe
It's useless. Some countries has strict data cap. The first 1 GB may be cheap
and bandwidth is good, but you can't keep using it with the advertised
bandwidth even for 1 hour. The data cap can be reached less than 30 minutes
and you are stuck with low bandwidth for a month.

I really don't like the business model of mobile network. They shall be banned
to advertise a few hundred of Mbps. What's good at 100+ Mbps when transfer
mere 9 GB within 3 days window results bandwidth restriction of 1 Mbps. It's a
fraud.

------
bump64
Bulgaria here. I don't know if the comparison is even relevant as we don't
have normal mobile data plans anymore. Most of the plans are providing 5-10 GB
of data to all networks and websites and some GBs to specific websites like
social media and popular ones. So for example I can have a data plan with 20
GB but after the first 10 GB I have fast internet just for facebook and
whatsapp. The rest of the internet is almost not accessible as it takes ages
to load.

------
gattacamovie
From what we can see in many of the comments, the research is deeply flawed.
E.g. In Roumania with 6e you get over 50gb. Actually Digi(RDS), telco has 4$
subsription with 100gb lte plus additional 50gb 3G (total 150gb)/month. As for
the speed, Bucharest was found the best internet connection in the world for
games (a research released few days back). Thanks to the EU roaming law, some
people realized that it's so good that you can use it anywhere in Europe long
term (years, without going back to Romania). Subscribe in ro with the smallest
plan 4$/month, and enjoy 1.7e/Gb anywhere in Europe, as long as you want!!!
This is only for Digi (not organge/vodafone/tmobile). ONLY Digi allows you to
stay long term in roaming (years). Here are full prices(use google translate):
"Tarifele de roaming, cu TVA inclus, care se aplica de la primul min/MB/SMS
utilizat sunt: apeluri locale si catre tari UE/SEE 0.0183 Euro/min; catre alte
tari 1.4875 Euro/min si 0.0060 Euro/SMS trimis. Apeluri primite 0.0094
Euro/min si 0 Euro/SMS primit. Trafic date 0.0017 Euro/Mbyte. Apeluri gratuite
in UE/SEE: 112 (Urgenta) si +40314007777 (info tarife). Multumim, echipa
DIGI."

So, if you are anywhere in Europe with higher than 1.7e/gb, make a Digi
subscription and you all set.

------
ilovetux
>> In Mexico you’ll pay an average of $4.77 for 1GB of data, making the
biggest country in Central America also the second-most expensive on average
when it comes to buying mobile data

I am a reasonably educated person within the United States. I may be wrong,
but I believe that I've always been taught that Mexico was within the North
American Continent.

Honest question, Am I incorrect about Mexico being in North America? and If
so, Am I also incorrect about what I believe i was taught (its happened
before)?

~~~
readarticle
Continent models are very arbitrary and vary based on where you are, what
language you’re speaking, etc.

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.

~~~
mantap
I think most Americans do implicitly treat it as one continent because if you
talk about Central America you kind of have to, otherwise Central America
would be part of North America and that's just weird.

------
zahma
The cost of 1GB doesn't seem to take into account the entrance to having a
line in the first place. I might not pay more than 1€ a GB but I still have to
pay 10€ to be on the network and I can't only buy 1GB, I have to buy 2, 10 or
50 or 100. The "base plan" is where the ISPs get you. That plus data is just
the modern day rents for tech companies. It doesn't really make sense to
compare data prices when the telecoms are charging varying entrance rates.

------
hboon
I'm waiting for a long-running job while reading this and noticed that it says
"228 countries". Supposedly there are about ~200 countries.
[https://www.worldometers.info/geography/how-many-
countries-a...](https://www.worldometers.info/geography/how-many-countries-
are-there-in-the-world/) says there are 195. Anyway, these are the ones if
anyone is curious about this like me. The few I looked up on Wikipedia showed
that they are indeed not a country (not that it matters for this survey..):

American Samoa

Anguilla

Aruba

Bermuda

British Indian Ocean Territory

Cape Verde

Caribbean Netherlands

Cayman Islands

Cocos (Keeling) Islands

Curaçao

Falkland Islands

Faroe Islands

French Guiana

French Polynesia

Gibraltar

Greenland

Guadeloupe

Guam

Guernsey

Hong Kong

Isle of Man

Jersey

Macau

Macedonia

Martinique

Mayotte

Montserrat

New Caledonia

Palestine, State of

Réunion

Saint Barthélemy (St. Barts)

Saint Helena

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Saint-Martin (France)

Sint Maarten

Svalbard and Jan Mayen

São Tomé and Príncipe

Taiwan

Tokelau

Turks and Caicos Islands

Virgin Islands (British)

Virgin Islands (U.S.)

Western Sahara

Åland Islands

------
throwaway936482
UK and $13 for 30gb 4g on a rolling monthly contract but there are a lot of
more expensive plans out there and people don't switch as often as they could.

------
bogdanu
I don't think the stats are that relevant, at least for romania.

For example I pay 6 eur/month for a prepaid sim that has something like 2k
minutes and sms, and 6 gb of traffic. The thing is that my carrier (Orange)
always offers an extra 50gb of traffic for free. Afaik, most carriers have a
deal like this.

The quality is decent, they have 4G coverage almost everywhere, maybe except
in the mountain areas, but that's to be expected.

------
lmilcin
I live in Poland. I have, personally, no less than three plans.

1 for my mobile phone where I have something like 15GB of data for equivalent
of 20USD (that including unlimited calls).

1 for my laptop, where there is a limit of 100GB for equivalent of 10USD

1 for my emergency mobile Internet which is unlimited monthly transfer but
limited bandwidth to 20Mbit/s (I have tested, I have not yet reached a limit
after uploading/downloading hundreds of GBs in one month I had to move to my
parents in law), for equivalent of 10USD per month. This came with a LTE to
WiFi router. I use it as emergency (I work from home, I need it in case my
1Gbit broadband fails) and I take it on trips with family so we have good
quality unlimited Internet wherever we are.

It seems silly to me that you can have basically free broadband and so
expensive mobile in a western country with technically advanced
infrastructure. I could understand operators wanting to recoup their initial
investments but in the long run mobile should be cheaper to transfer than
broadband (there less physical infrastructure having to be laid and
maintained).

------
codetrotter
One thing that is essay to miss if you glance at the map, is just how much
cheaper mobile data plans are in Denmark than in Norway.

I recently learned about this when a friend of mine pointed it out to me while
we were talking about the pricing of the mobile data plans here in Norway.

Here is a Danish website comparing providers in Denmark:
[https://telepristjek.dk/data-billige-priser/](https://telepristjek.dk/data-
billige-priser/)

Here is a Norwegian website comparing providers in Norway:
[https://www.tek.no/mobilt-bredbaand/](https://www.tek.no/mobilt-bredbaand/)

You’ll be able to read the tables even if you don’t speak Danish nor
Norwegian, since the tables show contain the word “GB” for gigabytes of data,
and the price which is in DKK and NOK respectively.

In addition to those tables mentioned, some currency exchange rates are useful
to make sense of the data if you live in another country:

100 NOK 🇳🇴 ~= 70 DKK 🇩🇰

100 DKK 🇩🇰 ~= 143 NOK 🇳🇴

100 NOK 🇳🇴 ~= 9.42 EUR 🇪🇺

100 DKK 🇩🇰 ~= 13.43 EUR 🇪🇺

100 NOK 🇳🇴 ~= 11.10 USD 🇺🇸

100 DKK 🇩🇰 ~= 15.84 USD 🇺🇸

------
tarasmatsyk
I can confirm, internet in Ukraine (top 5) is super cheap, most people don't
even realize how inexpensive it is comparing to other countries. Mobile
traffic is so cheap that it gets very inconvenient to keep your internet
habits when you are in other countries.

Italy seems like a great country to spend more time in, thank you for report!

------
preek
It's an interesting statistic. But it can paint a warped picture. For example,
it ranks Switzerland at #191 which probaby is correct. Othe other hand, since
7 years, I have a contract with 2 SIMs for 39CHF/m on which I'm well in the
3-digits GB/m. Hence, 1GB can also just cost cents.

------
ekianjo
How do they take in account unlimited plans in some countries for which 1GB
costs becomes actually incalculable?

------
aembleton
If you were looking for a mobile deal, then I think you would go for the
cheapest one, so I have created the interactive map again using the data for
the lowest price per US$

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQzJcAT0HcgB...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQzJcAT0HcgBIUmoSUFa6R1TdqmM4AXBVmcEB2SU1j04S6HzaqA8XxK2Vpm1ynVYxOyLXC_n0z8Vufa/pubchart?oid=747437768&format=interactive)

I've removed those countries that are over $5/GB/month such as Greenland
because it caused the whole map to be green due to how the data is skewed and
the limitations of the geo chart in Google maps.

------
siikanen98
I live on Finland and I've got unlimited everything for 16,9€/month. This
includes calls, sms and 200mbps LTE data. There is no data caps (not even
throttling, since that would be against the law) and I've had months with
400+gb data transferred, no issues.

~~~
trm42
Yep, the price published for Finland feels really weird. The operators are
nowadays selling even even unlimited data prepaids for 20-30 euros or 1 eur
per day. This of course makes gigabyte price comparison a bit hard as it
depends how much you download.

------
chrismorgan
Related discussion from 43 days ago on an article that used this as its source
data:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795147)

------
lifthrasiir
In South Korea, where avg price is $10.94/GB and min price is $0.43/GB, mobile
data plans are so much segregated that the goverment had to push cheaper MVNOs
to the wider public. For technologically aware people it's more like $2--3/GB
and telcos tend to exploit who are technologically less aware.

Given this and that telcos are universally known to be not super customer
friendly, average price seems a pretty limited metric and distribution
analysis should be required. Unfortunately their raw data has no actual data
points for each plan...

------
CraigJPerry
Why is the American market so expensive for data? Is there some kind of market
manipulation going on? I’d naively expect free market ideals to put America
near the bottom of the price range for a commodity.

------
gtirloni
What amazes me the most with my telco is that they charge $60 for a regular
plan which includes 4GB of data, SMS and phone calls, but if I want to buy 1GB
extra, it's $30-40 bucks. For a single 1GB of download.

~~~
gruez
Makes sense, because it's modeled on your willingness to pay rather than cost.
They probably did the market research and figured that people who use more
than 4GB of data per month probably depend on it to earn a living, and
therefore can charge more. Yet another reason why everyone should get a dual
sim phone, which breaks this sort of market segmentation.

~~~
inetknght
> _people who use more than 4GB of data per month probably depend on it to
> earn a living, and therefore can charge more_

Just like a hospital who charges $500 for a band-aid.

------
vmception
I have all sorts of international roaming perks, but if you actually want that
high speed in any other country you still need to buy a sim card in that
country.

Fix that, and then we can talk about comparative 1GB costs.

------
bserge
The price should be calculated for ~10GB, or better yet 50 or even 100GB, as
the prices tend to be lower the more GB you pay for, which becomes really
noticeable with "unlimited" packages.

Some countries/networks have true unlimited 4G, some give you a set amount of
GB at full speed, after which it drops to something barely usable (128-1024
Kbps).

I could use ~1TB/month on 4G on Three UK for ~40 Euros. That's unbeatable in
Europe to my knowledge.

Never got higher than ~300 GB/month though - even at that price per GB only
some Eastern European networks become competitive.

------
CGamesPlay
Funny story about my vodafone.es SIM card I bought last year. I used it for
about 3 months while traveling in Europe and Turkey. I bought 8 GB for around
10 EUR, and didn't use nearly that much. I renewed that plan the following
month, but due to some glitch in Vodafone's system, the same 10 EUR bought me
16 GB for the upcoming month. I renewed the following month, and my 10 EUR
again bought me 32 GB! I hope I can reactivate that SIM when I go back to
Europe, the monthly alotment should be up in the PBs by now.

------
BeeOnRope
I wonder how they factor unlimited plans into this?

In Chile, the mobile internet is quite cheap (and usually plenty fast, LTE is
widespread and download speeds > 10 Mbps are common) per GB but unlimited
plans are also common.

E.g., I pay something like $1.50 a week for unlimited internet and calls, and
since I can use 60 GB a month easy, that works out to ~10 cents a GB,
considerably cheaper than what the chart shows for Chile. It's also about 100x
cheaper than the $10/GB ballpark I paid in Canada. Yeah, one hundred times
cheaper.

------
kristopolous
I've met a few people in california that have a mexico cell phone plan and
claim to pay less despite it being international than they would if they got
an american plan. I haven't tried it myself though.

I'm on an expansive "family plan" with 6 people I know instead right now.
These are the same companies that charged more for calling across town with a
"local toll rate" than across the country merely 20 years ago, they'll invent
whatever they can to justify a fee

------
einpoklum
The things about the cheap mobile data plans in Israel is, that you sell you a
50 GB/month or 200 GB/month even if you absolutely don't need it. You can't
(?) get a 2 GB/month plan.

So it's the price that stays fixed and the amount of data that goes up.

I'm usually quite critical of the state where I live (Israel) - oppression,
social inequality, racism corruption in government... but at least we have
decent mobile plans for 10 USD/month. That's something I guess.

------
bchip
I am in the US. I pay $80 a month for TWO phones. My plan provides unlimited
calls, texts, and shared 2GB of 4G data. When my data runs out, my data speeds
go to 100kb/s.

~~~
ab_testing
You need to look at prepaid options. All major carriers have those. They are
not bad if you like in or around a metropolitan area.

TMobile -> Metro PCS

Verizon -> Visible

ATT -> Cricket

------
shirshak55
1 GB may show some statistics but it doesn't reflect the reality. Most of the
time I find many other things matter like latancy, throughput,qos. I am
currently on 45 mbps but still when i download it starts from 1 mbps and takes
like 2 minute to reach 45 mbps meaning do matter especially browsing. However
I must say during my intership at India the internet was very good. Its like
10$ and you are done for 1 month with free calls .

------
iamAtom
In India BSNL Fibernet has stepped up their game. Even rural towns and
villages (not all but the list is growing) now have access to 100Mbps internet
for ~10 USD

~~~
avasthe
$10 per month is too costly for many, we are happy with 30 GB per month 4G
data which costs around $2.

------
nobrains
The data is not adjusted for purchasing power. $1 goes much longer in South
East Asia (India, Pakistan, etc.) than it does in North American, for example.

------
quink
Not sure about South Korea, for instance, being at 202nd place for
affordability there when unlimited plans for even pre-paid tourist SIMs are a
thing.

~~~
traceroute66
As I said in my post (which seems to be being downvoted despite telling the
truth). The webpage is very naive and is not really telling the truth about
mobile contracts.

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

------
ilovetux
I am curious how this study differentiates between different regions. I have
been to many parts of the US, and my experiences have differed wildly enough
that I'd say that the differences might be as much as the global
highest/lowest quality in terms of bandwidth. Not in terms of censorship (I've
experienced that first hand in completely unrelated circumstances).

------
cromulent
Finland at 87, Australia at 16. Hilarious.

I came to Finland from Australia and asked what the limit was. 40Mb/s I was
told (quite some years ago).

No, per month.

They didn't understand the question. There are no limits. 40Mb/s, times the
number of seconds in a month.

Quick check: Optus is 10AUD per GB extra on all the plans. They don't mention
the speed, of course.

This is a bad piece of research.

------
NorwegianDude
The numbers for Norway makes no sense at all. Cheapest is supposedly $0.62,
but you can get 1GB for less than $0.0046, if you pay for unlimited usage and
coverage is good so you can average 200 Mbps.

And the average is much too low for 1GB if this was supposed to not include
transfer as part of a larger package.

Either way, the numbers makes absolutely no sense.

------
ez86
Russian Siberia here ;) Mobile LTE 50Gb data + 300 minutes coutrywide calls is
just $3/month. Proxies and VPNs work ok.

------
anotheryou
Germany is usually notoriously expensive. I'm surprised to see it on-par with
the US here.

Also what does cheapest mean? For germany I'd want to see 8eur for 3gb. That's
the budget default here set by Aldi (including phone/text flat, I guess 7eur
without that), Lidl allays following them after 1-2 weeks.

------
monksy
The cost for a 1 gb plan is insane in india. I paid about $3.30 for a 2gb plan
for a month.

By 2gb .. I mean it was 2gb of data per day. Granted the coverage wasn't great
and the network was way overloaded.

[https://www.jio.com/en-in/4g-plans](https://www.jio.com/en-in/4g-plans)

------
Blackstone4
Not sure if this will be a perfect comparison since some providers provide
unlimited data for a fixed price with high caps (i.e. 1000gb of fair usage). I
pay 32 British pounds a month for unlimited 4G with a fair usage cap of
1,000GB so that comes to $0.03 per GB....

------
rendall
I don't know if "cable.co.uk" reads HN, but there is a mistake in the article:
"Estonia is the cheapest of the three with 1GB costing an average of $1.27 and
sits in 53rd place in the world, while in Estonia 1GB costs $1.85 on average"

One of those Estonias should likely be Lithuania

------
k_sze
I think the comparisons could also use some normalization with respect to per
capita income (mean, mode, median?). 1 USD in the US doesn't mean the same
thing as 1 USD in China.

From the consumers' perspective, it's about affordability, not absolute cost.

------
z3t4
Should also take into account cost of living. I believe Internet cost much
more in poor countries.

~~~
Aachen
I'm surprised to have to come to the second page for this, was expecting this
top or second comment to link to a table where these prices are compensated
for purchasing power.

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.

------
kylehotchkiss
I bought a bag of chips in India (near Delhi) yesterday that had an Airtel
coupon code for 2gb of free mobile data. The chips cost 20 rupees, or about
$.25. Not bad at all! (the codes didn't work but I thought it was a great
giveaway concept)

~~~
ebg13
Is it a giveaway if the codes didn't work?

------
Synaesthesia
In South Africa data is really expensive, and we don’t have a lot of
disposable income. There isn’t really an excuse for it since Kenya has way
cheaper internet. We’ve just allowed our service providers to get away with
extortionate pricing.

------
Maha-pudma
I'm paying £9 for 30GB but that also includes unlimited minutes and texts. So
I'm pretty near the lowest in my country, UK. My only question is, who in
their right mind is paying the highest?! I mean £52… WFT.

------
bastijn
Apart from internet experience (speed, coverage, etc.) this should also be
corrected for the purchasing power parity as paying 12USD in Canada is very
different from paying that in e.g. India.

------
benbristow
Awesome site.

Most expensive in the UK $64? That's insane. Would be interesting to see where
the sources of these prices were. I downloaded the spreadsheet but it just
tells you the numbers, not the providers.

------
chiefalchemist
This is great. But additional and important context is speed. Knowing coverage
would be a plus as well.

Slow with mediocre coverage might be inexpensive but that waiting (and
swearing?) comes with a cost.

~~~
Scoundreller
In Canada, it's the opposite. Due to high prices, the speeds are very fast.

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.

------
gastlygem
In Shanghai I pay $11 per month for 16GB mobile data plus a 50M broadband at
home. I pay a bit more than that for the cloud VMs on which I install VPN
services.

------
trenchgun
This seems inaccurate.

I live in Finland and I have unlimited mobile data.

That is quite common.

------
TMWNN
I pay $25 including taxes and fees for two unlimited lines on Sprint in the
US, thanks to $15 Kickstart two years ago and the recent free line for life
promotion.

------
ziptron
1 GB of 24/7 access to unrestricted internet is different than 1 GB of always
down or censored internet.

They should consider that in the next "study".

------
izzydata
I'm doing my part in the US by not paying for a single byte of mobile data.
They will have to bring the price down for me to consider it.

~~~
Scoundreller
Yah, I'm paying ~CAD$35 for 4gb of data (incl. voice/SMS), and while I could
upgrade to 10gb for $50, I'm holding out for a 90%+ reduction in prices.

~~~
donmcronald
Where? What carrier? That’s $15 cheaper than anything I’m aware of.

~~~
Scoundreller
Fido has 9gb for that price. Retentions can usually work better deals.

Wind has 20gb for $50, but it’s Wind :)

I always investigate here: [https://forums.redflagdeals.com/ongoing-deal-
discussion-f129...](https://forums.redflagdeals.com/ongoing-deal-
discussion-f129/)

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shinryuu
It would be interesting to see the numbers relative to purchasing power
parity.

For an ordinary Indian person 0.07 usd might still be relatively expensive

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HJain13
Thats 5.25 Indian Rupee, even Beggars would earn more than that in a day.
Hourly minimum wage is 30cents, which as sad as it is, is still 4x the cost of
1GB data. I would argue cost of smartphones as a bigger deterrent. While in
most countries an okay smartphone would cost 20x the cost of a GB of data, in
India its roughly 50x

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traceroute66
Trouble is that webpage is largely a meaningless waste of time. Anybody who
has done business with the mobile operators can tell you that.

It doesn't take into account the different types of contracts (e.g. are we
talking about personal or business contracts, pay as you go or contract etc.
etc. etc. etc.).

Nor does it take into account the infinite and ever changing commercial
promotions the operators run.

If the chart on that website was to be believed, the data on my mobile
contract should be costing me 15x more per GB than it actually does !

Load of codswallop.

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nromiun
The map isn't that useful without showing what type of data it is. 1GB data is
very different over 2G, 3G and 4G.

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Reason077
I've used 2.93 TB of data in 7 months on my £30/month unlimited 5G plan. So
£0.07 (USD $0.09) per GB, I guess?

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est
The ones with Huawei devices are generally cheaper. Especially India Jio

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akritrime
smasung built Jio's network.

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fastball
I'd like to see this compared with a coverage map as well.

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lobo_tuerto
Mexico is part of North America, not Central America.

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sytelus
Superficial looks suggests that price is inversely proportional to area size
where infrastructure is needed and population density willing to pay for it.

