Finland - Unlimited voice & SMS/MMS + uncapped data at 2MBit/s: 35 USD/month, but that's without a contract. If you're ok sticking with the same provider for two years, you can get the same with 50MBit/s uncapped data. On the other hand, if you're fine with 256 kbit/s uncapped data and paying 0.10 USD per minute or SMS, it's just 4 USD/month.
Our population density is on average half that of the USA (16 people/km2 rather than 32 people/km2), and we're just as dispersed. The coverage of the above-quoted provider you can see here: http://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/
Explaining the high cost of US mobile comms in terms of the situation in Canada & Australia doesn't work, all you're really pointing out is that it's far too expensive there as well. In other words, your friends are also being fleeced.
Let me explain to you the difference between median and mean. Finland has an average population density that is half that of the USA but mostly because the population is heavily concentrated into six or eight islands around urban areas and the rest of the country has a very low population density. To serve 80% of the population of Finland I would need to provide service to less than 20% of its area. The US has many more urban centers, swaths of very low population density that are larger than most of western europe, and a high-density cluster along the eastern seaboard that would be the equivalent of providing Helsinki-level infrastructure over the entirety of Finland.
My point here is that each of the three has nearly complete coverage of the whole of Finland. Sure, faster data than EDGE
isn't available everywhere, but there's still service. And given that we're offering to these service providers only up to 5.5 million theoretical customers in total, they still manage to make a profit at the rates they charge.
And somehow the situation in the US is so radically different that even with your economies of scale customers are charged perhaps triple compared to here? I'd say explaining how it works out that way calls for extraordinary evidence, and I've yet to come across such evidence.
On both of those maps LTE coverage covers but a fraction of the country, Verizon has rolled out LTE to about 90% of its network footprint (http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Ve...) and they are still in the midst of an active deployment - the sheer cost of this deployement is staggering - the figures I know, for the Samsung LTE hardware - just the hardware alone for a mid sized market, just 700 or so sites costs around 70 million dollars - thats ahead of installation/construction costs - which I'm estimating at somewhere between 100-150k a pop (assuming no structural mods are needed, and there are no construction charges to bring in new fiber backhaul) - figure the US has around 200,000 cell sites - I cant find out how many finland has - but just on the size 104k sq miles (about the size of colorado) I'd estimate no more than 2000 sites - probably less.
Our population density is on average half that of the USA (16 people/km2 rather than 32 people/km2), and we're just as dispersed. The coverage of the above-quoted provider you can see here: http://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/
Explaining the high cost of US mobile comms in terms of the situation in Canada & Australia doesn't work, all you're really pointing out is that it's far too expensive there as well. In other words, your friends are also being fleeced.