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The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

cable.co.uk

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Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#321

Post by megous »

makecheck wrote: post #92

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 M…

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.

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#322

Post by uallo »

pw6hv wrote: post #307
uallo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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×…

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 th…

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

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#323

Post by qalmakka »

qalmakka wrote: post #246
gabrielblack wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which operator ? I'm interested.

If you get the right winback or operator attack promotions you can get amazing deals with the major MNOs.

For instance, https://verymobile.it/ (new MVNO from WindTre) has a 6.99 / 100GB promotion (if you switch from certain operators)

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#324

Post by 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.

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#325

Post by qalmakka »

readarticle wrote: post #306
ilovetux wrote: post #301

>> 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 Ame…

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.

AFAIK South and North America belong to two independent tectonic plates that happened to merge a few millions of years ago; North America was part of Laurasia, while South America was part of Gondwana and it was originally attached with Africa.

So I guess you can indeed argue that North and South America are two different continents...

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#326

Post by nicbou »

megous wrote: post #321
makecheck wrote: post #92

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 M…

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 o…

Caring, however, does have a cost. Not every website owner knows how to create lean, efficient websites.

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#327

Post by oldgradstudent »

assafmo wrote: post #312
inglor wrote: post #69

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…

> the government broke up the monopoly and forced competition into the market by making existing players share infrastructure. Yeah, this was excellent for 4G prices (I'm paying $8/mo for 40 GB), but now telecom companies are wary of installing 5G infrastructure, because they are forced to share it with other service providers who did not have to invest millions in new 5G infrastructure.

The same exact claims were made about 4G. Even if it delayed 4G by a year or two, it was well worth it.

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#328

Post by pavanky »

makapuf wrote: post #270
fireattack wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

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.

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#329

Post by donmcronald »

YZF wrote: post #218
donmcronald wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but those numbers are basically bullshit in terms of the real cost to get a phone plan with 1GB of data. I WISH 1GB of data was $12 in Canada. Unless you’re willing to make some huge concessions you won’t find a phone plan with unlimited calling, unlimited texting, and 1GB of data for less than $40 CAD / month. I currently do BYOD + 3Mb/s throttle + no support + low priority on saturated towers (IMO but not pr…

I'm with Public Mobile (they're owned by Telus now) and I'm paying $8/month right now. I don't use much data so I just recharge that when I need to. If you want to use my discount code I'll be paying even less ;) though tbh I think their cheapest plan is now $15 before any discounts. You can buy 1GB of data for $15 (which if you don't use carries forward) i.e. the official undiscounted price would be $30/month.

You’re throttled to 3Mb/s, right? I’m already using PM. 1GB @ 3Mb/s is good enough for about 10 hours of RDP, so I’m satisfied with it. I was mainly pointing out that to get to $12 / GB you have to be jumping through some serious hoops or adding it to a high tier plan, so the number in the OP is almost fictitious IMO.

The real metric to be concerned with should be the cost of the first GB.

Re: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries (Feb 2020)

#330

Post by lawl »

zahma wrote: post #247
takeda wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't talking about mobile, although given that article is about mobile, my bad I didn't clarify. I meant about wired Internet access. Running 10 wires to your house to have access to 10 ISPs is expensive and it's also a nightmare for the city. It is extremely wasteful because most people will only use one of them at the time. That's why requirement to lease is essential (ideally it should be a different entity th…

> I meant about wired Internet access. Running 10 wires to your house to have access to 10 ISPs is expensive and it's also a nightmare for the city. It is extremely wasteful because most people will only use one of them at the time. In Paris, you don't need to run separate cables into a building for each ISP. Orange Telecom owns the infrastructure and leases it out to the different ISPs. They then share the cables bu…

Similar in Switzerland. There are multiple providers building FTTH infrastructure and wiring houses. But each house is only wired once and the government mandates that if you build FTTH infrastructure, you have to rent out the (dark) fiber to anyone else under fair conditions (not quite sure if the gov sets the exact price or not).

This did quite a lot for competition here. Speeds went up and prices went down significantly. Small independent ISPs started renting the last mile and offering symmetric gbit at affordable prices which forced the old established ISPs to also drop prices and offer symmetric instead of artificially restricting upload speeds on fiber.

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