Important point. I was talking to my brother in India. Last month internet service was down in their building for 4 days. Unlike folks who go apoplectic over this, he understands that 3rd world prices do not come with first world service quality in practice. Most people do not have an option to move across continents just because somethings are cheaper there. And internet service is one small part of overall things o…
fwiw many of my coworkers in the Northeast US suffered multiday internet and power outages due to the storm that forced them to either take days off or travel >30m to find places with internet.
miles? minutes? metres? My high school maths teacher would like a word
>Important point. I was talking to my brother in India. Last month internet service was down in their building for 4 days. Unlike folks who go apoplectic over this, he understands that 3rd world prices do not come with first world service quality in practice. 4 days is pretty good turn around time for most US cities that aren't NY or SF.
It was just his building or may be apartment complex. I imagine city wide outages are more severe and likely due to some event like storm etc.
At least in India, the situation is far better now in terms of reliability. My internet goes down maybe once in 5-6 months, and when it does, it's back within 24 hours. Mobile internet is cheap and fast enough (I pay around $7 for 84 GB) that I can use it as backup.
My work is entirely online. I haven't worried about not having internet for a while.
I’m in Denmark. I have “3” as a phone provider and have essentially an unlimited plan for 30usd, with free roaming in most of the world. My home internet is served as an IOT plan with a “300MB” plan that in practice the network owned by the old national provider don’t cap, so I hit 1TB on 4G with a monthly fee of ~4.7USD. I know many people who does the same. The US really seem like in need of some good old competiti…
Could a random person show up in Denmark and buy this plan? That sounds amazing
Not sure. Some limitations were removed when EU rules for roaming charges were put in place. To be fair, my “IOT” plan is Denmark-only.
Israeli here, pay 7$ 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…
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.
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 mo…
Doesn't all of that censorship make .pk internet access more expensive than it would be? Firewalls and maintaining them aren't free. Cheaper to let it all pass through, especially when it isn't harmful to the network itself.
Amortized over 100m customers, in a country where network engineers can be found for $250/month, they're pretty close to free.
It's easy to underestimate how profitable it is to run a telco
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 suppos…
UK isn’t that bad. I pay £20 for unlimited data with tethering, and it’s faster than my home broadband. I used more than 1TB one month.
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 competiti…
Ironically, for “competition” you might well have said “free market capitalism”. Except that provision of basic mono-utilities such as drinking water, roads, and The Internet is probably best provided by the state. At least the cell phone tower part, leaving the internet exchange part upwards to private companies. (This pre supposes a level of benevolence / lack of malevolence from the state, or a faith in protocols…
Both the 4G infrastructure, and internet lines dug in the ground has beenopened up by law, so new providers can rent their way into existence for a reasonable price. Before then, the national monopoly that was TDC was horrible to deal with, and still is. I signed up for a fiber line for our office with them, and they’ve so far provided as bad a service as possible without breach of contract.
Competition is good, sometimes lawmakers are needed to make that happen.
Canada also has a telecom cartel. The CRTC, which is the gov't regulatory body (and which is controlled by the telecoms), limits access to the market.
> The CRTC, which is the gov't regulatory body (and which is controlled by the telecoms), limits access to the market. The CRTC does not limit access to the market, the elected government does. For national security purposes foreign ownership is restricted: > As it stands now [in 2018], foreign ownership of a telecommunications company is limited to no more than 20 per cent of a company’s voting shares and no more th…
Yes, “national security” is used to justify all manner of protectionism in this country. We sure love our oligopolies.