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India Beats UK and US on Mobile Data Price (bbc.com)
A study into the amount people pay for mobile data has found that the UK has some of the most expensive prices in Europe. From a report: The research, from price comparison site Cable.co.uk, found that one gigabyte (GB) of data cost $0.26 in India but $6.66 in the UK. The US had one of the most expensive rates -- with an average cost of $12.37 for the same amount of data. The results were "disappointing" said Cable's telecoms analyst Dan Howdle. "Despite a healthy UK marketplace, our study has uncovered that EU nations such as Finland, Poland, Denmark, Italy, Austria and France pay a fraction of what we pay in the UK for similar data usage. It will be interesting to see how our position is affected post-Brexit," he said. The study compared mobile data pricing in 230 countries around the world. The UK ranked 136th in the list. The global average was $8.53 for 1GB.
Don't check the price here... latest news :
Providers such as Virgin, Lucky, Fido, Chatr, Public Mobile and Koodo have committed to offering plans that will range from $15 for 250 MB to $30 for 1GB on a prepaid and postpaid basis. The plans are to be widely available by April 2019.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
We get absolutely pilliaged by the users of our public resource - the wireless spectrum - and it's unclear why, as a nation, tolerate it. :(
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
It is possible to get data for much cheaper than that listed price, if you are willing to do the most basic research and look at MVNOs. Red Pocket sells plans that are unlimited talk, text, and 5GB/month high speed data for $225 a year now, for example. However, if you insist on having a physical store with people there to babysit you, well expect to pay for it.
How do they even calculate a price for a GB, if country is using predominantly flat rates for mobile data?
I have one with max 300Mbit/s throughput (averages around 150), which costs me 31.90 euros per month, no matter how much I use it.
Includes of cours unlimited calls and SMS as well within the country.
Sure cheaper prices but you get shitty service for it.
low cost markets tend to be cheaper than those in the generally more expensive places.
Film at 11.
They pay less for netflix and all that too but they also have dengue fever, hepatitis, tuberculosis, malaria and shit in the streets so, swings and roundabouts eh.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
The EU has been leaning on telcos for too long with regulation. Brexit will free them to cut prices and REALLY compete which is what they wanted to do all along!
If price comparisons aren't adjusted to cost of living, then they are entirely worthless.
...the train. The poor souls of India ride ON the trains because they can't afford a 2D ticket. Talk about HOPPING a train! Just be glad they don't have airplanes. They'd be ON those, too!
The average is $8.53 for 1GB, but mobile operators advertise network speeds of hundreds of Mbps. If I run an iPerf3 speed test on my 500 Mbps home fiber connection, I transfer 0.6GB. On an average mobile network, that would cost $5, for a 10 second speed test. No, thank you. That's at least one or two orders of magnitude too expensive.
Just be glad they don't have airplanes. They'd be ON those, too!
Well played sir!
The article seems to completely ignore why India is so cheap. It was essentially a price war between siblings with rival companies. They pretty much put out of business or bankrupt most other companies in the process. Even Vodafone gave up.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/04/tech/rcom-ambani-bankruptcy-court/index.html
In UK, on Virgin Mobile,
1 GB = £7 pcm
5 GB = £9 pcm
12 GB = £12 pcm
45 GB = £18 pcm
So, depending on how much data you use, the price varies between £7/GB and £0.40/GB (between $9.40 and $0.64 USD)
These also include 2500 or 5000 or unlimited minutes and texts.
So the headline seems somewhat misleading ...
This is an average of the cost per megabyte of all offerings.This doesn't indicate how much people actually pay for a gigabyte.
A country might have multiple providers offering ultra-cheap packages. These are going to offer rubbish value for money, but hardly anyone actually uses the, except a handful of people who use their phones for emergencies only.
Pretty much nobody in the UK is paying a fiver per gigabyte. It takes no time at all to find packages offering 4GB for £11 a month from Three.co.uk. But the people who use most data are the ones on the higher data plans,
Unless you can find the amount of data used, and the total amount paid, your statistics are worthless.
Who did this research?
Did they just pick the worst deal and assume everyone is dumb enough to go with EE?
I get 500MB per month on each device from FreedomPop and I pay NOTHING. Sure, 500MB isn't much, but I bought 5 devices for about $50 each and have been enjoying 5*500MB = 2.5GB/mo for free for the past couple years now.
I suppose if you claim I paid for the data when I bought the 5 devices, I've paid the equivalent of $4.17/GB, which is still higher than India. On the other hand, TFA didn't say boo about how much those devices cost in India...
The countries with high data prices, like the USA, are the countries where those in government bend over and let their corporate overlords ass-rape the citizeny, usually in return for cash contributions to their campaign coffers. Duh.
Not a new. I also heard horror stories about cable costing $200/m. You guys are rich!
(Denmark) I believe I pay around 150DKK ($22 USD?) for 20 gigabytes of data, unlimited talk,sms,mms. :)
That goes for international as well, but only 10GB of data and have to touch homebase after a month or something like that, I suppose it to avoid it being sold and use 100% people outside the country. It means that when I travel to the US, I can use the phone like when I am home. It has been very useful.
L'Idiot
*India* beats the US and UK?
What is the cost of labor in India? What is the cost of real estate?
Of *course* India beats the US and UK in costs.
Quality not so much.
I pay 5,99€/month, taxes included, for 30 GB and unlimited calls to Italy (land and mobile), Europe and almost every developed country — even the US, whether or not they satisfy that definition — (land). What's wrong with you guys?
I about shot my coffee through my nose when I read the airplane bit. Hilarious and likely true.
"Moov over, Haji! I don't care if you vant a ving spot for better cellular signal. My grandmudder needs to place her bag of rice somevere!"
1. Most of Europe would fit inside the USA. In other words, we are SPREAD OUT. 2. In the USA, there are what, at&t, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and that's pretty much it, discounting the MVNO's.
It stands to reason that English speaking countries would pay more per byte, because the English language is more efficient, with each character fitting into 7 bits. For Indians, they are stuck with the inefficiency of characters in the range U+0900 to U+0D7F, which takes 3 bytes for each single character to encode as UTF-8. Even the French need to use 8 bits, or two bytes for some characters to encode as UTF-8, so that they have lower per byte prices is not surprising either.
1) It's expensive to mount an antenna in the UK - you need permissions, regulatory oversight, rent to land/building owner, cost of the crew to install and maintain it. You can't put any old crap up on any wall.
2) Spectrum licences cost the companies cosmic bucketloads of money
3) First world economy = first world prices
I had Google Fi before I left the US. I liked it a lot. My monthly price varied based on the data I used which was almost always less than 2 GB per month. So I paid on average $30 per month, which was quite low compared to other services. After I moved to the Netherlands, my service here with unlimited minutes and text messages, but limited to 2 GB data per month costs me only 11 euro per month, $12.43 at the time I am writing this. I was pleasantly surprised by how much cheaper cell phone plans are here in the Netherlands.
Having recently ended a stint of living in the USA, can confirm that the USA is a rip-off when it comes to mobiles.
I was spending about $USD60/month for 3GB+unlimited calls/SMS on T-Mobile. It was a $USD50/mo plan, but California decided to start taxing pre-paid mobile plans by an extortionate amount.
Back here in Oz I'm getting the same 3GB+unlimited calls/SMS for $USD9.20/month with Vodafone.