What about Toilets?
Well India has implemented ODF (Open Defecation Framework) where citizens can defecate on railway tracks, roadside or any empty lot openly. Millions of city dwellers are already availing these services.
India has the highest data usage per smartphone
161–170 of 262 posts
Re: India has the highest data usage per smartphone
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy crap, why am I paying $35/mo for 500mb? >.<
In the US, if you're not on prepaid, you're paying too much. T-mobile and Verizon have reasonably priced options in direct prepaid. Although, you won't get much cheaper than $35, you should have more high speed data for that, along with unmetered slower data. Third party (or wholy owned subsidiaries) MVNOs are often less expensive as well.
My $40 T-mobile postpaid plan has unlimited 4G/LTE data (non-throttled, but only 6GB can be used for tethering).
Re: India has the highest data usage per smartphone
#163Ugh. I live in Arkansas, and my AT&T bill this month is $410. Granted, about $150 of that are payment plans for devices, but still. The base rate plan is $110, and there's a $20-30 per line fee for four separate lines. I have an iPad Pro 11" LTE and an iPhone X, my wife has an S10+, and I handed down my 6th Gen iPad LTE to my 10-year-old. It's a lot more than "needed", and our aggregate data usage is 30+ GB/month, bu…
Why dont you use tethering and use the connection from your phone on your ipad?
Tethering incurs extra charges too.
Re: India has the highest data usage per smartphone
#164Americans are going to be livid when they learn how cheap data plans are in India. The reason this works is free market, unlike the US where the likes of Comcast have monopoly in the regions they operate. Hasan Minhaj did a show this week on Netflix, you should watch it - he explains pretty well how horrible Comcast like companies are.
>Americans are going to be livid when they learn how cheap data plans are in India. The reason this works is free market, unlike the US where the likes of Comcast have monopoly in the regions they operate. What does Comcast have to do with the price of cellular data?
Because they're Xfinity Mobile. Their plans are $12 per GB of data.
Re: India has the highest data usage per smartphone
#165I wonder how population density effects price for cellular carriers. One reason wireless is expensive in the US, to my knowledge, is because much of the surface area is sparsely populated with customers requiring more wireless tower infrastructure to cover fewer people (then costs are spread across most the national or regional customer base).
In dense cities, I imagine towers can theoretically serve more people. Obviously you reach a saturation point where a tower can only serve so many people and has to be expanded but I suspect this lowers infrastructure costs. One would have to be able to handle larger "burst" demands in a densely populated area though.
On top of that, I'm not familiar with topography of India, but certain areas in the US are mountainous and as a result, require even more towers to provide coverage (for typically sparse populations). In dense cities where you have near line of sight, I imagine that increases range reducing infrastructure demands some (though this constraint may be moot based on typical tower saturation).
In India I would expect cheaper prices based on that line of reason, though I may be missing something critical (I'm no telecom expert).
Re: India has the highest data usage per smartphone
#166and we arent even close to peaking. The biggest telcos in India havent even started content plays. Netflix just entered India. And we still have HALF A BILLION people not on the internet. This is in an environment with constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights to privacy (that cannot be reversed by the govt), a govt run mobile payments infrastructure that is literally a free Stripe+Paypal+Venmo+Alipay and perhap…
Even seen the balance sheets of telcos in India. They are drowning in it and very soon it would become unserviceable. In NPA (non performing assets) India is among top 5 in the world and recently beat Italy on this dubious distinction. When all government owned banks write off this money, it is taxpayers who will be footing the bill.
> Healthcare is dirt cheap and very good.
That's news to me because afaik it is damn expensive for the income level in India.
Re: India has the highest data usage per smartphone
#167Ugh. I live in Arkansas, and my AT&T bill this month is $410. Granted, about $150 of that are payment plans for devices, but still. The base rate plan is $110, and there's a $20-30 per line fee for four separate lines. I have an iPad Pro 11" LTE and an iPhone X, my wife has an S10+, and I handed down my 6th Gen iPad LTE to my 10-year-old. It's a lot more than "needed", and our aggregate data usage is 30+ GB/month, bu…
4 lines with unlimited data starts at $120/month at Tmobile (and goes up to $160 or $200/month if you want to add tethering and international data). If they have decent coverage where you live, you should switch.
Re: India has the highest data usage per smartphone
#168I'm from India. I can confirm this. It's because unlimited LTE data costs about rs700 per month or 10 dollars. It can be spotty at times - but it works. Mobile is by far the most used form factor. Search for "Jio" on your app store and you'll see a variety of apps like JioTV, JioCinema, JioNews etc.. That means free news, live tv and movies all for the price of a cell phone subscription. Jio is the name of the servic…
”there's almost no need to buy a TV anymore to watch content.”
You’re talking about access. People don’t buy a TV to get access to content, they buy one to watch the content, whether that’s via cable, OTA, streaming services, pirating, etc. Are you saying that people in India are just fine with consuming all of their TV and movies on a tiny phone screen?
I know some people who don’t have a TV, but they would rather just not watch TV/movies at all than stream it to their phone (other than maybe during a long commute or while on the plane).
Re: India has the highest data usage per smartphone
#169I think it is because there is much less usage of home internet in India. Thus what North America and Europe split between mobile and home internet is all on India's mobile. This means that India is actually much lower in total bandwidth usage per month per person than North America and Europe overall.
True, but it also means that wireless networks are physically capable of replacing physical infrastructure, but aren’t in developed countries because of artificially high per gb prices.
It is especially possible in a 5G world. :)