40GB of Data That Costs the Same As a House

Barence writes "PC Pro has an infographic that reveals the extortionate cost of roaming data. They compared the cost of data typically bundled with a fixed-line broadband package (40GB) costing £15, with the cost of buying that data on various mobile tariffs. Buying 40GB of data on a domestic mobile internet tariff from Orange would cost the same as an iMac; buying the same quantity of data on O2's non-Europe roaming tariff would cost £240,000 — or the same as a three-bedroom house."

Comments

You need to move to texas

[Hadlock]

You can get a 3 bedroom house on a quarter acre in a respectable neighborhood for $130,000 (that's £90,000 in metric dollars for you british types). Sure, we won't have enough water for our population when the apocalypse comes, but in the mean time 3 bedrooms here is considered on the small side.

Re:You need to move to texas

[JWSmythe]

    Food and water can be acquired. The more important thing we've lost is our hunter/gatherer survival instinct. If there were a serious ELE, the first waves of heavy deaths (assuming no traumatic ELE cause like the sun exploding), would be at the 1 to 2 week mark, as people died of starvation and dehydration. Water is abundant, if you know where to look, and are willing to consider drainage retention ponds, canals, and other bodies of fresh water. Of course, there would be plenty of human inflected deaths too, fighting over canned goods and bottled water. Don't believe it? Consider what people will do to each other on "Black Friday", and that's for a fucking discount on unnecessary material possessions. Along the same lines, watch your local news. Murders, rapes, theft for the sake of theft. Realize that your local news is covering a small area, and then multiply it by the number of metro areas world wide.

    People will lie, cheat, steal, and murder for that last can of spam, or bottle of water, but won't eat their own dog, or drink from the swimming pool. Ya, if it gets bad enough, Fido will make some nice BBQ.

    Back to the topic though...

    Vendors will sell at prices that the market will pay. They're not raping you. You've bent over, handed them the lube, and said "Here's $200/Mb. I'll be back in a month for more."

    When people stop paying the outrageous prices, the price will come down. Only that, or fair competition will keep it in check. Fair competition, unfortunately, will only bring it down to a point where all parties profit margins are satisfied. They have to keep the share holders happy, after all. No company does anything out of the goodness of their own hearts. They're in business to make a profit, and you, the consumer, have shown them what you're willing to pay.

    Just like our survival instincts, we've forgotten that we, the customer, are in control of the companies. If they don't service us the way we want, we have the choice to go elsewhere. If there is no other option, we have the choice to not use their damned service. Do you really need a cell phone that plays movies, music, gives GPS directions, and (for the ladies) have the extended vibrate feature? No. You got one to make calls on. You've all been swindled by the vendors into paying more for the prettier newer phones, the add-on services, etc, etc. ... and that's how I feel every time someone complains that prices are too high, as they cut the check for the bill. "This costs too much, but oh well, I'll pay anyways."

Re:You need to move to texas

[ShakaUVM]

>>Who would want to move to America from England to a southern state full of bible bashing racist retards....

I think you're getting your metaphors confused.

Atheists bash Bibles
Christians (well, some Christians) thump them.

And if you think people in the south are still racist, in general, you're the retard.

Re:You need to move to texas

[Renraku]

What's wrong with that? Make friends with your neighbor and you'll eat deer steaks for a week.

Re:You need to move to texas

[AK Marc]

Everybody, in general, is racist. Those in the south moreso. I was born in and spent my first 30 years in the south, and southerners are, in general, more racist than than the average Americans.

Re:You need to move to texas

[drb_chimaera]

Depends where he is, over here in the UK bible-basher is used in the same way bible-thumper is used in the US

Two countries, separated by a common language...

Re:You need to move to texas

[bernywork]

They are able, but not willing. A lot of people in London and a lot of English, don't want their city going up and up and up in height. A lot less natural light, and more people. They don't want London turning into Singapore which is the way that it would go if the developers had their way.

Re:You need to move to texas

[Kjella]

Just like our survival instincts, we've forgotten that we, the customer, are in control of the companies. If they don't service us the way we want, we have the choice to go elsewhere. If there is no other option, we have the choice to not use their damned service.

Ah, the capitalist manifesto - almost as far detached from reality as the communist one. Yes, that's what all companies like you to believe even when they got you by the balls. And there's a mutual understanding with your competitors that price wars are bad so we'll all offer the same overpriced, underperforming service and your only real option is to exit the market altogether. No TV, no phone, no Internet... hey, how are you on slashdot at all? I'm pretty sure you're feeding one of those vendors that you rave about to be here. Unless you're on a small regional ISP, in which case they're paying the megacorps instead of you.

If you really believe that we don't need laws against false advertising, antitrust, first sale, price dumping, any of those consumer laws that give us rights. DRM is fine, if the market doesn't want DRM it'll be rejected - you don't own a DVD drive that supports CSS do you? Clearly that means you wanted it and an industry-wide association didn't shove it down your throat. Doesn't matter if you use it or not, you paid for it and they can say the public doesn't care and everyone has a DVD player that supports it. Same goes for any computer with DVI/HDCP or HDMI - which is now most computers bought in the last decade.

Reality is that the "invisible hand" of the market can be trussed up like a pig. Oh, you might be allowed to run around in a small pen to give you an illusion of freedom, but you're not going anywhere. Sometimes the government helps, but often it's more than enough that the government stands completely aside - which is something libertarians will never admit. You're only in control insofar that you could go all Amish on them and start your own self-sufficient agrarian society. As long as you don't want modern medicine or anything, because that's all ruled by megacorps too. But I guess 99.99% of us aren't willing to go there so then we deserve everything we get, right?

Re:You need to move to texas

[eugene ts wong]

Then kill you. Eat Soylent Green for another week!

It's the economy!!!!

[Dutchmaan]

I remember the days when a three bedroom house would only cost you 640kb... ahhh those were the days!

Handing over packets between coutries

[drolli]

That seems to be an extremely labor intensive task. Every packet is obviously checked manually.

That's Cheap

[igreaterthanu]

A few years ago my mobile provider (Vodafone) charged NZ$0.10 per 10kB block of data. That is NZ 41.9 million per 40GB or £21.6 million.

Luckily they are much less unreasonable now.

If you used text messeges...

[HungryHobo]

If you were to transmit that same 40GB by text it would cost you $52,400,000.

Proposed caps

[Joce640k]

Luckily the EU is investigating this and will impose rate caps on everybody.

Under the new scheme those same 40Gb of data will only cost as much as a Ford Mondeo.

Re:Proposed caps

[jawtheshark]

Actually, anyone who has advertisements enabled on slashdot will have seen ads by abroadband.com. I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a customer. For good reason: I live in Luxembourg, which is tiny, so leaving the country is easily accomplished. You get plans with unlimited data here, but beware if you leave the country. It get expensive quickly. That's why I took the up the abroadband offer: emergency use in my own country (as it doesn't matter in which country you are) and when I leave the country and can't get access to normal wifi.

While 0,59€/MB might seem a lot, it is a great option to have in case of an emergency. 40GB of data would still be the price of a (entry-level?) Ford Mondeo though. Doing the same with my metered data plan, which is probably one of the most expensive in the country, would cost 3,4 times more, within the country. I don't even want to know what it would cost while roaming.

Still not cheap, but better than nothing.

Re:Proposed caps

[Kjella]

Funny, I haven't. Maybe /., like the rest of the corporate web, uses IP geolocation to ensure everybody doesn't see the same web. (Yeah, I'm a bit bitter, and true, obviously localized ads aren't the same issue as localized content.)

What's to be bitter about? Without localized ads they'd only make sense to huge chains and corporations with shops/product all over the world. Now I'm not fond of ads in general, but an offer I can't even use is a complete waste of both my time and their money. Well except hosting and such I can buy anywhere in the world, but that's a tiny exception. And if I wanted to there's plenty ways to proxy the connection...

Re:You don't need to move that far

[Stormthirst]

But then you'd have to live in Wakefield or Blackburn...

That is absolutely nothing compared to SMS rates.

[NtwoO]

With a standard 160 char SMS consuming 140 bytes (7 bit GSM encoding) and at a rate of 20ct per SMS on some Prepaid tariff plans, you are looking at an excess of 61 million for 40GB.

The joy of local SIMs

[cheros]

If you're not aware of roaming tariffs your company hasn't briefed you well. However, given that Blackberries seem to roam much cheaper it proves that such tariffs are a rip off..

I went to the UK, and for £1/day I had proper 3G connectivity - nicely shared out over a local access point :-).

Roaming is the last route by which telco's can rip off their customers (well, apart from SMS charges, but they have it least the advantage that it stops marketing people from abusing something you cannot block).

Re:Mobile companies overcharges their services...

[Archtech]

Not only is market regulation compatible with capitalism; it is essential for it. Just as rules and a referee are essential for boxing. Without any rules at all, capitalism quickly devours itself, and destroys the (somewhat) free market that spawned it. Microsoft is (or at least used to be, for a while) a fairly good example of what happens to a market that is insufficiently regulated: pretty soon there is only one serious player.

Stop and think for a moment of all the laws, regulations, and other rules that prevent you from being absolutely free - even in your economic behaviour. How many agencies does the US federal government maintain to control business activities? Yet it's all ultimately in vain, because to accomplish anything the regulators must be in contact with the companies they regulate. Then the "money gradient" comes into play: many of the people who are supposed to be regulated find ways of influencing those who are supposed to be regulating them. In a culture that values money above all, people with very little money are supposed to control the actions of people with far more money. It's as obvious as a simple circuit diagram that money changes hands (in some shape or form) and the regulation becomes, let's say, milder and more congenial.

Eventually you reach a situation where - to cite an extreme instance - the SEC goes through the motions of investigating allegations against Bernard Madoff, and claims that it found no evidence of wrongdoing.

The new regulation works though...

[jpapon]

My provider (Simyo) just created new EU roaming plans because of the legislation. I can now get 50 min for 4.99EU and 50MB for 4.99EU, useable in any EU country. While still not particularly cheap, that's really not bad at all. 150MB is more then enough to check maps and email over the course of my upcoming three week vacation, so I won't even hesitate.

Not to mention, they have a server side roaming data cap which is opt-out (thats right, by default it is ON) set to 59euros.

After my experiences with AT&T in the US, I can't even begin to express how pleased I am with this change. Two years ago I took a summer trip to Europe from the US and brought my iPhone... They wanted something ridiculous like $200 for 50MB. Over the course of two weeks I made about 100 minutes of phone calls and used 10MB of data, and came home to a $900 bill.

I'm so glad I jailbroke the phone, moved to Germany, and now get to benefit from reasonable consumer protection legislation...

Re:That is absolutely nothing compared to SMS rate

[Richard_at_work]

IF you were stupid enough to transfer 40GB over SMS, you can pay the price for that stupidity.

Re:That is absolutely nothing compared to SMS rate

[blueg3]

That's nothing. If I transmit data across the country in my usual way, by writing it out in hex on the back of a postcard and mailing it (one byte, two hex chars per postcard), it costs me almost $300 / kB just in postage alone!

Re:Try Australia

[aleph]

Drifting from the point of the article, but just for reference a 3 bedroom house in Sydney costs $600,000 easily, and in many suburbs well over a million. And at present the 1 Australian dollar is trading for $1.07 US dollars. They haven't had their property crash in Australia. Yet.

$600k for a 3br house? You're talking like 90+ minutes from the city, right? ;-)

$400k+ for a decent 1br+study apartment in the inner suburbs.