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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?
Rent. American businesses love extracting rent.
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).
They're not. They're deluded if they think anybody in Western Europe is paying $3.13 per GB in 2020. ;-)
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?
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 pro…
I'm in India and I pay $8 for 84 days and get 2.5GB/day for those 84 days.
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.
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).
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
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...
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).
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.
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.