Trouble is that webpage is largely a meaningless waste of time. Anybody who has done business with the mobile operators can tell you that.
It doesn't take into account the different types of contracts (e.g. are we talking about personal or business contracts, pay as you go or contract etc. etc. etc. etc.).
Nor does it take into account the infinite and ever changing commercial promotions the operators run.
If the chart on that website was to be believed, the data on my mobile contract should be costing me 15x more per GB than it actually does !
Exactly, just take Canada for example, most expensive 1gb: $99usd, it's clearly not just for a simple "1gb data" plan, it's probably one that allows unlimited call worldwide without any charge...
Some places probably doesn't even have those kind of plan so of course they will rank lower if every plans are under $20 because there is nothing worthy in it...
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?
Maybe the word 'cost' is not the right term, better would be to talk about 'price'. The price is as high as the market will bear, clearly people are used to paying more for data in the USA and as such there is less incentive to bring down prices. The actual cost - as in what it costs to send data from A to B inside a carrier network - does not vary much between countries and can even be higher in some of those countries where retail prices are lower than in the USA.
In the US Jevons paradox is in play with debt and rents. Baumol's cost disease also means debt and rents are slowly snuffing out other types of economic activity.
You've got a bunch of buzzwords to describe why telcos in America fleece customers. Make it simpler for the rest of us, would you? Rent isn't a good thing here.
It's exceeding obvious, capital is cheap. The means the finance industry uses more of it. They use it for rent seeking shenanigans that wouldn't make a return if it were higher priced. The problem is increased rent extraction reduces the return on economic activities that require real investment. Because the cost of labor and rents are too high to compete with aforementioned shenanigans.
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 providers will charge more if they can, less if they have to.
Can you point to a source that says labour costs are the reason for high Telco prices? The ongoing maintainence of a tower seems like it would be fractional to operational cost.
Of course towers are a fraction of operating expenses. It was just an example of one piece of the puzzle. All labor costs in Myanmar are far lower, from marketing to lawyers to retail store staff.
And as I said, there are other reasons such as consumer surplus (rich people can pay more, so they do).
As an extension to this comment, other costs that could impact the delivery price of 1GB of total usage:
- speed
- overall saturation of tower (# users per tower)
- population density (full coverage of an area may be difficult)
- technology; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_sta... which could affect federal regulatory licensing costs, technology licensing and acquisition costs and competitiveness of market to provide technology, tower density, total user capacity
This is my laymen's interpretation. For instance, to blanket the US (9.834 million km² and 36 people per Km2) in LTE would be a significantly harder challenge then blanketing Myanmar (676,575 km² and 83 people per Km2) or even Norway (385,203 km² and 15 people per Km2).
Just look at the stats for Myanmar, 86 people per Km2, and I might be able to get most of them within 300-500k km2. My subscriber base is excellent!
Beyond the usual arguments about "the US is big", poor competition is probably a big part of it. US telcos have a lot of lockin, with very long contract lengths, poor acceptance of prepaid plans, and "family plans" being common. All of this makes it less likely that people will move network, so there's less incentive for telcos to actually compete on price.
EDIT: On the "US is big" point, it's notable that pricing doesn't really follow population density in Europe. The UK has four times the population density of Ireland, but only fractionally cheaper data. Germany has similar population density to the UK, but far more expensive data (though I wonder are they looking at all extant contracts or something; data recently got a lot cheaper in Germany).
All three countries have comparable household earnings. Sweden has a third the population density of Ireland (less than a tenth that of the UK!), slightly higher average data cost, _cheaper_ minimum data cost, and comparable household earnings.
In general, any attempt to explain this via recourse to population density, income or GDP fails in the developed world.
Having lived in a couple of developing Asian countries, there’s a few obvious reasons that the services would be cheaper. For starters, everything about doing business is cheaper, especially salaries. Unreliable service is completely normal. There’s also additional income streams for service providers. Getting spam SMS tailored to your nearest cell tower (like special offers for nearby restaurants) is completely normal. HTTP content is much more common place, and it all has ISP injected advertisements. Service coverage is also much worse, tourist areas have the best coverage, followed by business districts.
If you looked into comparing the services from any two different countries, you’ll find completely different sets of market and geographical circumstances. The costs of providing the service will be different, the actual service provided will be different, and the demand from consumers will be different.
If you compare Australia and New Zealand for instance, there’s some very obvious factors that could explain that difference. Australia has a lot more outbound submarine bandwidth than New Zealand has, with New Zealand also being much further away from the rest of the world. Most of Australia has either no service or terrible service. New Zealand has approx the population of Sydney, while having more than 20x the land area. Australia has about 5x the population of New Zealand, so all of your fixed prices per customer are going to be less in Australia.
For any two countries you’re going to get an incredibly long list of factors that influence price. Population density seems like it should have a significant impact on the cost of building and maintaining mobile infrastructure for example. The US has close to 10x the population density of Canada, and Europe has over 3x the population density of the US, which I would expect is a non-trivial contributor to the reason that Canada is more expensive than the US, which is more expensive than Europe.
The lack of competition is the actual reason. When Google was entering markets with their Internet service suddenly incumbents got capacity to provide competitive speed at slightly lower price. Essentially causing Google to give up with that initiative. If a company with "unlimited" amount of money like Google can't enter to compete, no one can.
And if there is no competition, you no longer charge competitive prices, you charge what people are willing to pay. The whole promotional plans they offer are used to figure out how much you are likely to pay. Once the promotion expires and you don't call to get it extended, you are basically saying that you're ok with increase. Once enough people don't do that, the price will go up.
Similarly, here in Canada, after Bell's UBB plan (forcing TPIAs to the same restrictive 25GB cap as the telcos) fell through, they wasted no time coming up with unlimited plans.
You need to build coverage for a huge portion of the population to get a license in many western countries. So all customers in the less densely populated countries have share that cost.
There is also strict requirements on uptime and huge fines for telcos in western countries if the service goes down, even for just a moment. Needless to say that creating a resilient network costs a lot more.
The chart is potentially misleading because it only focuses upon the dimension of transfer when markets can be based upon speed. South Korea oftentimes has tiers of data based around speed rather than a cap or aportionment, which is part of why its cheapest 1 GB is less than 1/4 of what it is in the US but seems comparable. My point is mostly that level of service is another dimension that is hidden from the chart that should be quantified to better understand the underlying trends.
While I agree with your logic, a small correction: for India the data you found would probably be per capita and for USA its per household (which I think constitutes 3 or 4 members).
I'm not sure where you get $15. The linked site says $8:
"with 1GB costing an average $12.55 in Canada and $8.00 in the US."
Nor do I get why you think all of Asia is inexpensive. South Korea is far worse than the US, despite a far lower median income, at $10.94 average. If you adjust that to the US, it's more like $24 (200% higher than the US). And Japan is fairly bad vs global prices as well when adjusted for income levels (around $6 to $6.50 equivalent in US terms).
Why are US prices higher than they should be? Two primary reasons. First, the two big telcos initiated (and held) the market at a very high price point from inception. The US was the first large cellular and smartphone market. It has taken limited competition, primarily in the form of T-Mobile, more than a decade to drag those high prices downward.
Second, wealth / income adjustments. Consider the Ukraine example. The US has ~20 times the GDP per capita of Ukraine in a typical year. Their $0.46 cost is comparable to more like $9.20 with a US adjustment, which is higher than the US cost. US median disposable incomes are among the highest, only comparable to smaller affluent countries like Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland.
You also can't sell 1gb for $10 in Ukraine, it's not a very good business model. The people can't afford those prices. The telecom operators in countries like Ukraine do not make very much money selling mobile plans.
Most telecom operators around the world operate at very thin margins with low profits. Verizon by itself generated $30.4 billion in operating income in 2019. AT&T generated $29.4 billion in operating income. T-Mobile generated $5.7 billion in operating income.
So between the three US telecom operators, that's $65.6 billion in operating income every year (best compared to Apple or Microsoft in size). The entire rest of the world has nothing remotely like that profit bonanza, outside of a select few large operators.
I’m not sure about the other two, but T-Mobile has an unlimited data plan that is $40 a month for unlimited everything for a phone and $20 month unlimited for tablets if you have at least one phone on the plan. They don’t throttle you but they do prioritize your data over 50GB. I’ve never seen it happen.
But because you can’t just add more wires to the airwaves, there is a limited amount of bandwidth no matter what you do. So that’s fair.
As someone work in that industry, I see that one huge cost is people (including me) working there. So first step will be eliminate or convert these millions or so jobs in telecom industry which currently offer middle class living to about or below subsistence level.
Another will be to bring down quality of service level. A couple of years back I was india and area where my mother lived had service down for like a week. That area must have a population of at least few 100Ks.
Third to have very little customer service staff. People here have legitimately said why the hell do I care about 1000s of customer service/call center staff. I want my service cheap. In countries like India they have done that. Social media call these companies evil but I think they are just trying to run cheap service.
Fourth is to spend much less on network equipments and field testing. Service is announced at much cheaper price point but backend systems are severely overloaded so one gets much more network/call drops.
> Third to have very little customer service staff. People here have legitimately said why the hell do I care about 1000s of customer service/call center staff. I want my service cheap. In countries like India they have done that. Social media call these companies evil but I think they are just trying to run cheap service.
In Canada they do that and keep the extra profits. Koodo is one of Telus’ flanker brands (for the illusion of competition) and even though they’ve increased phone and plan pricing a fair bit over the last couple of years they’ve gotten rid of the ability to directly call customer support.
The Canadian government has been promising us action in the mobile industry for ages, but year after year after year our prices go up and up and up.
I'm sure you've read some of the other comments, but none of this explains the massive price difference to Western European market. It's all about lack of competition due to lack of consumer friendly regulation.
A good starting point would be legislation that Israel enacted to get competitive markets as described by rvp-x:
> - Ban on SIM-locking of phones to one provider
> - Allowing users to change providers without losing their phone number
> - Ban on "exit penalties" for customers leaving a contract
> - Forcing existing infrastructure providers to share their infrastructure with virtual or not-yet-fully-deployed new providers
The same points hold for India as well. We’ve never had SIM locking and exit penalties and have had number portability for quite a long time. Cellular infrastructure though was handled by “non public facing” companies, owned by consortiums of telecom companies. With the entry of Reliance Jio, these companies joined hands to lock Jio out of their networks. For quite some time, cross network calls would be of very poor quality or almost impossible. Things have improved a lot since then.
However, it’s great the Israel has made it possible for infrastructure to be shared as a utility, allowing new players an easier entry. That will keep things competitive for a long time.
I drove around Africa from mid 2016 to mid 2019[1]. I bought a SIM in most of the 35 countries I went to, uploaded YT vids, hi-res photos and just video chatted family. Overall the 3G connectivity was impressively fast, and almost always a fraction of the price of Canada or the US.
It was always my dream to complete the loop, but the situation just didn't allow it.
It is impossible to get a visa for Libya, and with the ongoing civil war the safety situation is B.A.D.
Even if I got a visa, the Egyptian military wouldn't let me get anywhere NEAR the border. They're extremely protective of tourists and won't let them go anywhere "dangerous". They also wouldn't let me drive the Sinai over to Isreal.
Also, the border from Algeria into Morocco has been closed for years, and nobody could tell me what would happen if I showed up and tried to cross.
So, unfortunately Egypt was the end of the line on that one!
Funny enough, for the Sinai they don't care about me being kidnapped, they care about my Jeep being kidnapped and used by ISIS against them. So a good vehicle like my Jeep is not allowed across the Sinai, but they don't care too much (or at least you can talk your way through) on a motorbike.
Not sure about South Korea, for instance, being at 202nd place for affordability there when unlimited plans for even pre-paid tourist SIMs are a thing.
As I said in my post (which seems to be being downvoted despite telling the truth). The webpage is very naive and is not really telling the truth about mobile contracts.
The wallet cost of mobile data is lower than the inflated prices shown on the website.
They're only looking at total transfer costs and not level of service. You pay more for faster speed oftentimes in Korea and the baseline price may be a little higher than something like Cricket in the US but level of service even in the countryside is substantially better.
What amazes me the most with my telco is that they charge $60 for a regular plan which includes 4GB of data, SMS and phone calls, but if I want to buy 1GB extra, it's $30-40 bucks. For a single 1GB of download.
Makes sense, because it's modeled on your willingness to pay rather than cost. They probably did the market research and figured that people who use more than 4GB of data per month probably depend on it to earn a living, and therefore can charge more. Yet another reason why everyone should get a dual sim phone, which breaks this sort of market segmentation.
This is an amazing visualization and clearly shows what I found while traveling through Asia. Would love to see this mixed with average salary per country, which I expect will show an inverse correlation.
Even European countries are generally cheaper then US when it comes to mobile internet. E.g. France is 10 times cheaper on average. While France minimum hourly wage is $11.83 and US minimum hourly wage is between $7.25 to $14.00 (depending on state). It seems that US is a bit expensive regardless of the salary. Mobile companies are very competitive in Europe, and European regulations put fuel on the fire by making the number portability mandatory very early. Reducing the friction to change mobile operator while keeping the same number and with minimum to no downtime.
In Canada, it's the opposite. Due to high prices, the speeds are very fast.
But this can also mean that a single poor decision can leave you data less (or rationing) for the rest of the month. Most plans just lock you up until you pay more, rather than continue throttled.
Then you have software obviously written by people with zero consideration for data costs. NPR One app thinks it's a great idea to pre-stream hundreds of MB of content. Thanks NPR. Zoom doesn't have any low-bandwidth modes. While iOS lets you enforce a 'low-data mode' when tethering to metered connections, OS X doesn't. Thanks OS X for downloading that update while I was on a train. I was doing my best to ration what I had left by using Lynx for fuck's sake.
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).
Someone having a 1GB plan might, because of the base costs. But of course someone with a larger plan wouldn't, which makes it impossible to get a meaningful "average" here (+ the question if you value phone minutes/SMS or not). Comparing pricepoints of similarly sized plans would be a lot more meaningful.
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.
> I suspect it's the backhaul from the mobile mast but I'm not sure.
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.
I'm in the U.S., and I pay for an unlimited 4G plan and download a lot. My price per GB is cheaper than 9 cents/GB which is what the article reports as India's average price.
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 supposed to.
Meanwhile, Greece with its telecom cartel is a few spots from last, with such good company as Turkmenistan, the Virgin Islands and, for some reason, Canada.
I might as well get a SIM shipped to me from Italy every three months or so, it'll be lots cheaper.
> 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 than 33.3 per cent of the voting shares of a carrier’s holding company, and an effective total limit of 46.7 per cent (as long as the foreign entity doesn’t have control). On top of that, at least 80 per cent of the board members must be Canadian citizens.
You know, with the amount of data some companies and governments are slurping up it might almost be justified... of course as a 5 eyes nation it's also pretty damn hypocritical.
Even major cloud hosting companies (AWS, Digital Ocean, OVH) have Canadian build-outs for folks that are sensitive to domestic/international issues, and yet if connect with Bell your traffic tends to go to Chicago and then back.
What's more funny to the Greek mobile internet comedy (or maybe drama for us greeks) is that before 1 year, after the elections, the new prime minister asked nicely the telecom operators to offer cheaper mobile internet. The operators agreed of course.
The result? There were some mocking offers in the form of double GB for the same price right after the meeting (ie instead of 10 euros/1 gb you'd get 10 euros/2 gb). After 1 year nothing more. The telecom operators think that we are in the 2000 where mobile internet is something that only company executives need...
I think the time has come for the government to stop asking nicely for cheap mobile internet and force the operators to align with the rest of Europe.
They should just break up the cartel and let them compete normally, that would take care of everything else. How to break up a cartel of the richest people in a corrupt society is a different issue...
Italian here too, I pay 5.99 €/month for 30gb (never really experienced caps). Iliad is the provider. SMS texts and calls are also free and unlimited.
Iliad is pretty great. Given that by law there are both a minimum number of players and incentives for the entry of a new players, Iliad managed to get pretty awesome pretty fast.
I think I have the same plan. I have to say the only thing I'm missing (and I would gladly pay 2 euros more for) is global (or at least EU) free SMS while not roaming.
Free global messaging isn’t gonna happen. It’s not like internal messaging which is essentially free, but if you send a message to Congo, they want real money to deliver the message.
Meh, as long as I have internet connectivity I don't need texts. Iliad includes 2gb free in roaming mode, as gp correctly pointed out (I forgot about that, but it was very handy when I was in Leipzig during last CCC).
European roaming is very different from “global messaging”. I assume you were trying to reply to the same person, not me. I don’t need global messaging either.
Also FYI it’s 4gb. I know because I just ran out of it.
That's outrageously good. Sadly I can't seem to find it. Their website shows a minimum of £26 for unlimited data on a monthly contract, and £13 a month for a yearly contract.
Agree - these numbers are way off and to be honest are pretty difficult to calculate. There are a number of 'unlimited' mobile data plans and at the same time you can still get charged 50c per MB ($500/GB) on some pay-as-you-go plans.
My phone has also been my sole internet connection for the last 12 years.
What I don't get is they are selling wireless broadband at the price I mention above, but if you buy what is essentially the same product as part of a phone plan instead (i.e. they've simply packaged it differently), you pay something along the lines of 10x or 20x the price per GB.
Just to add, while technically it's 4G, it's hard to rely on that and most of the time the speed I get is less than 2-3mbps and the connection is really unstable(lived in multiple places all across India). It was much better when jio was just launched due to less users. But now it has become race to the bottom and there is no way to get a good 4G connection in India.
At least where I live (or honestly wherever I've been in South India) Jio has been mostly reliable enough for me to even work remotely with zoom calls and ssh/slack. So YMMV is the real conclusion.
I have definitely worked on Jio's network without issues. But have also been to areas where it is patchy. But things have definitely improved in terms of both data plans and their speeds ever since jio came into the market.
I am in the US. I pay $80 a month for TWO phones. My plan provides unlimited calls, texts, and shared 2GB of 4G data. When my data runs out, my data speeds go to 100kb/s.
Does that include phone payments at all? Because it sounds like you’re getting a not so great deal. I’m also in the US and pay that much for unlimited everything on 2 phones
I'm on a T-Mobile 4 line plan at $30/line. Unlimited everything except I think it deprioritizes data over 50GB/month/line. But I've never exceeded 10GB/month yet.
This data is worthless and likely very skewed by the use of mean prices instead of the median, while not displaying the standard deviation.
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.
This is very obvious to me too. Australia is placing better than the UK, despite mobile contracts being almost universally more expensive and less good in Australia. It seems to be because there's an expensive UK plan skewing the data, despite not being what most people have.
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 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.
It probably does, and you'll find lots of ISPs, VPS and hosting providers also forbid IRC servers. The main reason for the blanket ban is that once upon a time (and perhaps still) IRC servers were widely used for malicious bot command and control systems and it's easier to just forbid them at all than pay people to spend their time sorting the good guys from the bad guys.
You know, I just checked, and they seem to have been removed those references. But from what I recall the reference was explicitly IRC. I remember thinking, "Why IRC?"
It would be possible for an ISP to MITM the traffic between Cloudflare and the origin server since it can be configured to be done via unencrypted HTTP or non-trusted certs on HTTPS (flexible SSL). See https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censo... for an example of Cloudflare serving a MITM notice page for pirate bay.
I would've bet money if Pakistan starts building a GFW, it would be with china's help but no, they bought equipment for this from an american company called Sandvine.
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 one has do deal with in their daily lives.
Another way to cheaper price is that most jobs done in first world is to be outsourced to much cheaper places, which is happening. Or push lot of middle class jobs to subsistence level jobs, which is also happening.
Although, the benefit of having cheap mobile internet / Fiber broadband plans is - you can have multiple redundant backup services!
I spend a few months a year in Mumbai, India.
I have a truly unlimited 300Mbps fiber connection as the primary source ($25/Mo), a second 100 Mbps connection from a different company as backup ($10/Mo) and my mobile LTE as the third backup ($10/Mo). AND my international roaming US Google Fi network as the 4th backup for $10/GB :)
This setup does work pretty well for me.The backups have come in handy at times.
My mom had slow DSL for years 6Mbps/1Mbps through the local phone company. They had stopped offering DSL to new customers for years.
I had to stay with her one summer while we were literally between places to stay. Our lease was up and our house was being built.
She got cable internet so I could work. She now has Had both DSL and cable for four years just so she will have backup internet and if she cancels the DSL she won’t be able to get it back.
>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.
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.
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.
> Last month internet service was down in their building for 4 days
I don't live in India, but if it happened in an individual building that sounds like perhaps this was due to management of that building and was just an isolated incident.
For buildings and apartment complexes, they usually have a dedicated switch/line (I don't know the technical term).
So, it's most likely that the cable got damaged due to bad weather (rainy season, laying out cable open to the sky), or the closest switch suffered a damage due to electricity fluctuations. These are the 2 main reasons for internet going down for that long. With me, it usually happens during a power cut. While I have UPS power backup and my router keeps running, it seems the local (geographical) area hub doesn't and internet goes down for 5 minutes.
Sure, but that just means it's an irrelevant factor when comparing low vs. high telecom costs.
Though my thinking is when selling censorship equipment to a country, you probably charge a country like .pk more because you know they'll find a way to pay for best-in-class.
Running a telco is not that expensive. The problem is that building out the infrastructure in the first place is hugely expensive.
This is why most countries have only a few "real" operators that own and operate infra, and tons of virtual operators (MVNO) that run on top of others' gear.
They were doing the bare minimum at first. PTA would order the ISPs to censor resources which would implement the block alone and that's it. Easy to bypass with HTTPS, a 3rd party DNS server, or a VPN. They've since bought an $18.5m web monitoring system from Sandvine and centralized the censorship under PTA. The companies don't deal with it anymore: https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/surveillance/pa...
And let's not forget being assumed to be a spammer by almost all sites, getting rate limited or shadowbanned, not to mention being buried with captchas and having to do unpaid labor to train Google's AI just to access some sites! If you're not outright blocked, that is.
All for having an IP address originating from such regions with cheap internet that you can't do much with anyway.
Oh yeah, I have experienced that for a lot of my life. I didn't realize that that wasn't normal, though. I haven't experienced Canadian internet for long enough.
However, I can definitely say that I have had to solve a lot of captchas and can recall at least one incident where I could only have been banned because I was from Pakistan.
It happens often on Reddit, which is really bad with their shadowbanning and associating you with other accounts that you have nothing to do with, probably because crappy ISPs reuse IP addresses for multiple users.
That really has nothing to do with the quality of the connection (what kind of bandwidth/ping and availability).
It's people misbehaving that causes these types of ban and who are voting for pro-censorship government. They could remove these restrictions overnight if they wanted to.
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 provable) for $23 per month.
I wish the government would set reasonable pay per use data rates and make all the carriers abide by them. $12 / GB would be a godsend for low end, price sensitive users.
Last month my Fido bill was $21.11 CAD for both my girlfriend's (4Gb) and my (3Gb) plan. Due to a variety of factors, including (read: entirely due to) generous CS reps, both are heavily discounted.
Note these are data-only plans, without SMS or calling. We use the Acrobits softphone (iPhone) or the built-in voip client (de-Googled Android) with voip.ms for
- Voice calls
- SMS/MMS (in-app, forwarded to any cell number, or via any email client)
- Transcribed voicemail
- Automatic call recording, and
- Spam-call blocking by configuring an IVR (spam callers can't press "1" to continue).
I've no relation to Acrobits, Fido, or voip.ms aside from being a customer, though I happily recommend all three.
I think you're over-estimating the discounts - the plans you linked were for talk, text, and data. The plans I'm talking about are here[1] at nearly the very bottom of the page.
Current plans listed are 4Gb for $10/month, though they would require being paired with a voip provider, as I mentioned above.
Fido is available nation-wide, AFAIK. You're likely thinking of Wind. Originally available in select cities (such as Toronto or Vancouver), they were bought out by Shaw in... 2015 (?) I believe, and renamed to Freedom Mobile. They are currently available in most major cities, and rely on roaming in less densely populated areas.
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.
I just don't see how access is even really relevant to the cost. Content restriction seems like a governmental thing, unrelated to service providers. IT's not like the Pakistani internet is cheap because of the resitrictions.
1Gb of internet in Australia ($0.68) is fantastic value compared to 1Gb of internet in Canada ($12.55). Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst the fastest in the world.
In Canada, we're mostly limited to Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw, along with some other provincial crown corporations. Our geography might cause a slight increase in costs, but other than that, limited choice in the market and high barrier to entry keeps our fees high I think.
MVNOs are unable to operate in Canada because the carriers mentioned above won’t let new entrants use their networks. It’s how they protect their oligopoly.
There are significantly more MVNOs on Telstra than there are on Vodafone -- I think you'd be surprised how many more. I would hazard this is because there's a giant legislated fence down the middle of Telstra (referred to as "structural separation") that literally demands that Telstra's retail and wholesale divisions not talk to one another.
On a tangent related to that, though, I am very confused about exactly how Australia ended up with such a robust, competitive market when it comes to Internet services.
Importantly, Net Neutrality has never ever ever been a thing in Australia: Zero-rating content has been a thing since the 90s: when my friends had a blisteringly-fast-for-the-times 10mbps cable internet package (with, from memory, a 50GB shaped cap), you wouldn't bother downloading something until it hit the BigPond Games site, where the downloads didn't count towards your cap.
Even now net neutrality is not a thing: All of the physical network operators bundle in unrated Netflix or Spotify or, y'know, whatever. They compete on offering the best value-adds, as opposed to competing on crippling the service the least.
I'm thankful for it, but also it strikes me as particularly odd, in the current times where I expect literally every company to be essentially defrauding little old ladies to turn a buck.
Do any fellow Australians have any idea what the real reason for this is? Is it to do with the early legislation demanding Telstra's wholesale & retail structural separation? The mandatory (again, legislated) wholesale of ADSL by Telstra?
Why does Optus (read: Singtel) play ball? Is it because of the aforementioned issues?
I think one of the main reasons it strong oversight of the sector by both the ACCC and Telecommunications watchdog.
It took a long time to force this, but aggressive competition by regional ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) forced Telstra to allow access to their ADSL network, and once that was in these and other companies used similar tactics to force open other markets.
Optus aggressively used MVNOs to build market share in mobile markets, and while Telstra still charges a premium the generally decent quality Optus network has kept a cap on how much additional they can charge.
I would suspect genuine regulated competition is the correct answer here (as you spell out). This is in contrast to the monopolies and corruption seen elsewhere. The customer service is still horrible, and NBN remains a disaster.
The independent ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) had excellent reputations for customer service until they were all taken over by TPG.
Nowadays Aussie Broadband has a pretty good reputation and interestingly has basically followed the same model: not always the absolute cheapest, but competes on benchmarks like speed, and with an engineering-heavy management team.
I cant answer your questions on net neutrality, but I do have fond memories as a teenager of waiting 24 hours after a WoW patch came out to grab it from unmetered from GameArena to save my parent's 13gb download cap.
Here's my understanding of it. (I'm sure someone else will correct me on the details)
The tl;dr summary of it is because it was a defence against Telstra's monopolistic practices.
Zero Rating developed because of a few factors:
Telecom Australia were the only providers of international internet connectivity because they owned all the landing points in the country.
Telecom Australia also owned the first comprehensive nation-wide data/internet transit fiber network around the country and to many cities.
Telecom Australia (which was originally entirely government owned) really didn't give a damn about competing - you either paid their price, or you didn't get connection.
I believe Optus may have had access on one or more submarine cables, but that was primarily for phone service.
Telecom Australia eventually became Telstra. They also built an ISP called Bigpond, which was their home-internet brand.
I believe it was Southern Cross Cables that was the first carrier-neutral submarine cable, and that wasn't online until mid/late 2000 in Sydney.
So, the zero-rating of data started as a way of letting Small ISP's customers download content from international sites, without it costing the ISP a fortune.
I remember pretty much every ISP had their own little quota-free services that they'd host themselves. Game servers were a big one, along with patches, mods, maps, movies, and even some would provide mirrors for the early music streaming services like DI.fm
At the same time as all this was happening, various ISPs were setting up and/or peering with the first IXs and allowing users to access services on the other ISPs for free. At first this was just within your state, but then some ISPs built up interstate capacity and allowed free access to content in other states.
This was coinciding with the rollout of ADSL, again which outside of the capital cities - was largely a Telstra undertaking at first. For Telstra, they already owned all the copper, fibre, and buildings to put it in - so it was a relatively cheap proposition. There was a lot of disputes between Telstra and ACCC over whether Telstra would be required to provide access to their copper network and also the ADSL Network, and under what terms. Eventually other ISPs won the right to install their own ADSL gear in Telstra exchanges (although Telstra screwed with that as much as possible) and so they built out/extended fibre networks to all the phone exchanges for this.
Telstra also made their own online services (Bigpond Movies/Music/Sports/Games/etc) quota free to their own customers. My understanding is that they still didn't do a settlement free peering for access to that data.
Optus effectively followed Telstra's lead in everything with few exceptions.
When Shaw purchased Freedom, I was optimistic that they would put a serious amount of money into building a sufficient number of rooftop, monopole and tower LTE last mile access sites to be serious competition to Bell, Telus and Rogers. Sadly this has not been the case. The network coverage even in the major metro areas of Vancouver and Toronto is very poor compared to the others.
I think Shaw sees much better ROI from their last-mile captive DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable customers. Many of whom are on places where the local telco is years away from doing a real GPON FTTH overbuild. So it's 150Mbps+ DOCSIS3 service options vs 10-15Mbps ADSL2+ on long loop length copper.
I do not regard the parent as cherry picking data at all.
I travel a lot, internet experience varies wildly especially in locations where restrictions are in place. For example typing this on a phone in a coffee shop in China, VPNd as for some non-reason HackerNews is blocked.
The internet in MY is pretty different from VN, or even a skip across the border to SG. Not easy to pick a spot on the globe and assume everything in the vicinity is the same. Even ISPs in the US.
1GB in India is pretty cheap+good. A small amount of stupid censorship but otherwise pretty solid.
I lived in Canada for about ten years. It's a ridiculously expensive place in terms of food and internet costs. At the time I was pleased because the best connections we had in India were 1Mbps. When I moved back I was happy to see we had way better internet, digital payments and banking services.
I knew the difference between a gigabit and a gigabyte but didn't know there were official symbol units for them. According to Wikipedia a gigabit is indeed Gb and a gigabyte is GB.
Having the only difference be case was always bound to cause confusion. :/
Yes, I hate that, not only since sometimes people accidentally get it wrong like just now, but what if it's in all lowercase? What is 32gb? Oh it's multiple of 8 so it might be bits.... Imagine how great this world would be if we just settled on gbit for bits and any variation of GB for bytes.
> Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst the fastest in the world.
Really? That hasn’t been my experience — and granted I’ve never lived in Australia or spent much time out of Sydney but I was there for 10 days in February and even though I paid for 4G Plus or whatever Optus calls LTE, speeds weren’t even comparable to what I can get in the US and were truly behind what I got in Seoul (where I was right after I was in Sydney). The only research I’ve seen that indicates Australia is amongst the fastest comes from research that is based on maximum speeds, not average speeds.
I can appreciate that Australia has robust cellular networks (assuming the user doesn’t live somewhere where they are forced to use satellite), in part because home internet speeds are so poor, but I wouldn’t put it in even the top 10 of parts of the world I’ve visited for internet speeds.
YMMV depending on where you are and what network, but Australia was the first place I managed to do 100 Mbps speediest on LTE (this was a few years ago, now I can get 200 Mbps where I live). I spent my time in the more rural parts of the country and was on Telstra though.
Optus is terrible. It's worth paying a slight premium for Telstra 4G. I'm on a 45gb cell phone plan for AUD$60 and it works everywhere, even in tunnels or remote areas, with speeds that shame my Fibre To The Building connection (though not in latency). My work laptop uses Optus and regularly loses connection despite being in an inner city suburb and close to a cell tower.
I would say in England £20 gets you roughly 20gb of good quality internet, but there are lots of plans that will sell you way more for way less with poor coverage and throttling.
The post implies that they found a rate which was $2 for 20gb in the U.K. in their cheapest tarrif - which I assume was some sort of ‘unlimited capped at 200gb for £15’ style deal which would be heavily throtttled.
I’m currently travelling through Italy and I can have full strength 4G but almost no data connectivity. I don’t know how anyone manages to use their data allowance here.
Have you got a new SIM from a local operator (which one?) or are you using your old one ? In the last case perhaps there is a problem in the roaming config.
In Italy the connection is pretty good (50 down /10 up Mbps), at least in the urban areas.
Basic contracts give you unlimited voice, unlimited texts, 50-70GB/month for about €8.
Depends on where you are of course - a friend of mine sent me a speedtest screenshot amused at how his download speed on a mobile connection in northern Italy was ten times faster (literally) than his ADSL connection in south London!
Your comment makes a strong implication that prices are correlated with quality (and thus attempts to provide justification for price gouging by Canadian telcos) but the rest of the data makes it clear that’s not the case.
The comment really doesn't and I don't think you can conclude that generalization in another way either because there are too many counterexamples in the map. There's no way the expensive Internet in Uganda is superior to Sweden's. Furthermore, qualitiy varies much more in the US than it does in Sweden where its universally high quality and slightly cheaper. French and German internet are both pretty good but seem to differ greatly in price. Portuguese internet isn't that much worse than Spanish (unless you count the annoying setup for Portugal.) Check the map for even more counter examples.
If I had to guess the prices probably have more to do with subsidies, general infrastructure quality and competition than resultant quality.
I didn't mean to, nor did I imply that price and quality are correlated. I gave the prices as a quick reference to the link, and the commentary is my own personal experience. You're welcome to interpret it however you like, but please don't credit me for how you interpret it.
This isn't necessarily true in all cases - I can cite you an opposite example. Pre-covid, I was in Singapore. You pay $10 SGD for 1GB of data ONLY (no calls included). The top network operator in Singapore is state-backed Singtel.
Their network coverage is very poor in many areas within the city. Singapore is almost literally just one big city and yet, the 4G experience is extremely poor.
Also, customer support is very difficult to get hold of, if you're on the prepaid plan. I almost found it a rip off to pay so much for 1GB of 4G data for such a crappy experience.
Now, after my trip, I went to India. I paid $10 for 1.5GB of data DAILY from Airtel (India's top provider) which also includes free unlimited calls. The experience isn't uniform (India is quite huge in comparison to Singapore) but within any tier A city, Airtel is MUCH better than Singtel. Also, the customer support is top notch for the peanuts you pay them and you can find an operator to talk to in usually a minute or less. For comparison, in Singtel, you would have to navigate the crazyily designed IVR and wait for atleast 5+ minutes before you can talk to a real person.
I'm just citing this example to prove that the most expensive 1GB isn't necessarily the best.
>$10 for 1.5GB of data DAILY.
to be clear you paid $10 and you got 1.5GB daily for a Month, correct? If not you are taken for a ride by Airtel. Jio charges ~$5 for a month and you get 1.5GB daily with unlimited calls.. bandwidth ~40mbps in tier 1 cities and 10mbs tier2 and tier3..
I should have been clear, yes you're correct - I paid $10 for an entire month for 1.5GB of data daily. I'll try out Jio next time, thank you for the recommendation.
I wouldn't recommend it. Jio has too much of a load issue, especially at nights. Airtel isn't the top provider in India, and thankfully so. Airtel is much much faster than Jio, even if it's slightly more expensive.
Misleading. You didn't do five minutes of research.
Singtel (the most expensive telco) has multiple plans for visitors (100GB for $12 + 500mins talk + 1GB roaming + $3 to spend on public transport). If you want prepaid month to month, it's still nowhere in the stratosphere of $10/GB.
Also 4G coverage is virtually 100%, buildings and Faraday cages aside. (source: living in Singapore for 10 years, through 3G to 4G migration)
Notice it says "Data plans" - They give you only data and claim to give you free incoming only for 20 days as a bonus. That's not even a bonus, in India, you pay nothing for incoming, at least on the Airtel plan I mentioned.
Also, about your point on being expensive - Singtel is the only Telco that doesn't suck in terms of network coverage in the country. Starhub is a close second, with slightly cheaper plans depending on what you're after and M1 is garbage and everyone knows that.
I suggest you try 4G somewhere near Toa Payoh, Bishan, Bedok or even some places within Paya Lebar.
Not sure why you had to be so rude (5 minutes of research?) and created a new account just to contest this..oh well.
I lived in Singapore and while I was there, I used MyRepublic's mobile plans. The plan I was using was $24(SGD) a month for 17G. Rarely had connectivity issues though for the most part, I stayed in the more populated areas so I may not have had the same connectivity issues as you.
One of the nice things was that each telco would keep changing their plans to be better and better so it paid to pay attention and change plans whenever a better one came along.
Thanks Gary, haven't used My Republic personally, but I've tried the rest, and wasn't impressed. Will consider My Republic next time. I travel a lot around Singapore, hence my experience.
> I suggest you try 4G somewhere near Toa Payoh, Bishan, Bedok or even some places within Paya Lebar.
I’m with Singtel and don’t have any problems in those places. I even had 4G on Pulau Ubin today. Singtel has a $25/20GB plan for locals, $10/1GB isn’t really representative of typical plans.
I agree, Pulau Ubin coverage is pretty good, but that isn't indicative of the rest of the places. I'm a consultant and I travel quite a lot around the city.
My criteria isn't just having 4G, but able to actually use it in decent speeds.
This is where Singtel sucks for me - the 4G logo will show on your phone, but pages will never load due to poor connectivity, even with 5 bars. I had this issue across three phones - iPhone, Sony and Samsung.
Singtel ALSO seems to do lot of throttling on videos depending on
where in the city you're as well.
New account because first time I've been compelled to correct something so blatantly wrong.
As other posts have pointed out, $10/GB is not right (tourist plan or not). If you lived here long enough to know what the rates are, why misrepresent it?
Pakistan and PayPal is really a special case. It has nothing to with the telecoms infrastructure and everything do with a legal dispute between the government of Pakistan and PayPal. PayPal is not available in Turkey, either, for similar reasons.
When leaving Australia in 2005, it had one of the worst value mobile/internet plans, was pleasantly surprised returning after 15 years to find it now offers some of the best value.
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
I pay $25 including taxes and fees for two unlimited lines on Sprint in the US, thanks to $15 Kickstart two years ago and the recent free line for life promotion.
Most expensive in the UK $64? That's insane. Would be interesting to see where the sources of these prices were. I downloaded the spreadsheet but it just tells you the numbers, not the providers.
Taiwanese here, I think Taiwan's data is inaccurate. Our mobile carriers have a "unlimited" plan, which you can actually use unlimited data. The price of the plan varies a lot, but my unlimited plan only costs 499TWD/m(16.9USD/m), and I use nearly 50GB per mounth. But I'd like to mention there is no such as unlimited texts here, only unlimited data. I think this is why SNS is preferred over SMS and iMessage.
Here in Italy lots of plans actually stopped offering unlimited SMS because nobody uses them anymore. I think I must have sent less than 10 SMS in the last 5 years or so.
True. There might be other more expensive contracts, but most people in Taiwan that I know either have a "real" unlimited data contract for like 17 USD per month or a "fake" unlimited contract (with like 25GB and reduced but still acceptable speeds afterwards) for about 14 USD per month. One example provider would be Tstar.
I've been amazed at the effects of this every time I've visited India. With data so cheap, social media use is prolific - people share videos and stream all day long - and public WiFi is far less commonplace since essentially /everybody/ owns phones with almost unlimited data plans.
India still has a long way to go in terms of social equality, poverty and breaking up the caste system, but providing fast, cheap Internet for all is undoubtedly a great first step.
Sorry, But I have seen the opposite effect of cheap internet there. People spend lot of time in spread hatred, fake news and animosity using internet service.
I have seen this first hand with so many of my educated friends and relatives who were reasonable folks before internet boom and now they come across caricature of dimwit person. With so much information available on internet they still chose to pick lowest quality sources.
Not sure why you were downvoted because this is exactly what is going on. One might say that the problems were societal and already there - technology has just provided the bandwidth for explosive spread of these things. To be fair, it has also provided an amazing increase in outreach. A person in a village with barely any infrastructure can have a video call with their friends/family - that is empowering.
This might be true (it appears we have similar people in the western world). However, I think you're being downvoted because it seems you're advocating less internet access in the hopes of more equality.
It brings up an interesting question, though: Assuming for the moment that internet access actually increases hatred - is more hate towards a group a good tradeoff for empowering them by giving them internet access as well?
You are right. I could have worded differently to not imply that less internet is better. Point is that better internet connectivity lead to better social outcomes at large is wishful thinking.
That's not really an Internet issue, and more the idea that moderation of hateful content is "censorship". It would be the same in public if people couldn't be kicked off premises going on disruptive hateful rants.
This is actually true. The fake news is over the limits.
The elder generation believes some WhatsApp forwarded message so easily that WhatsApp and Facebook are political propaganda machines. Google about "Whatsapp University" meme. I honestly wish anything should not be allowed to be forwarded more than N times where N < 4. And I wouldn't care end to end encryption breaked on forwarded messages in order to fact check them.
India is a remarkable success story in mobile data. A great deal of that success is due to Reliance Jio, who launched an LTE-only network in 2016 and totally disrupted the Indian market.
... to the point of killing off nearly all other competitors. They are neatly poised if they now want to do monopoly-based price gouging, or create a walled dystopia.
I used to have unlimited 512kbps "broadband" via public tel (BSNL, Phone line), up until 2013. I moved to delhi and as a broke university student, I'd gone through incremental upgrades with cable, fiber, wi-max connections, and have seen it stablise.
I moved out in 2017, but I'm glad for the LTE access that my parents can use from the same tiny city (with DSL Line, now at 1mbps as an alternative). It's great! Indeed, lots left to do about other issues, but I think we get to be happy about this particular development.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadIt doesn't take into account the different types of contracts (e.g. are we talking about personal or business contracts, pay as you go or contract etc. etc. etc. etc.).
Nor does it take into account the infinite and ever changing commercial promotions the operators run.
If the chart on that website was to be believed, the data on my mobile contract should be costing me 15x more per GB than it actually does !
Load of codswallop.
Some places probably doesn't even have those kind of plan so of course they will rank lower if every plans are under $20 because there is nothing worthy in it...
Can someone with knowledge of the industry please explain the reasons for this discrepancy to me?
Simple simple simple.
Look up PPP.
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 providers will charge more if they can, less if they have to.
And as I said, there are other reasons such as consumer surplus (rich people can pay more, so they do).
- speed
- overall saturation of tower (# users per tower)
- population density (full coverage of an area may be difficult)
- technology; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_sta... which could affect federal regulatory licensing costs, technology licensing and acquisition costs and competitiveness of market to provide technology, tower density, total user capacity
This is my laymen's interpretation. For instance, to blanket the US (9.834 million km² and 36 people per Km2) in LTE would be a significantly harder challenge then blanketing Myanmar (676,575 km² and 83 people per Km2) or even Norway (385,203 km² and 15 people per Km2).
Just look at the stats for Myanmar, 86 people per Km2, and I might be able to get most of them within 300-500k km2. My subscriber base is excellent!
When prices are based on ability-to-pay rather than cost of provision, then that means there's a competition problem.
While Norway may have more expensive labour, I'm sure they farm out as much as they can offshore.
I wonder if Ericsson or Nokia charge lower prices for the same equipment in poorer countries.
EDIT: On the "US is big" point, it's notable that pricing doesn't really follow population density in Europe. The UK has four times the population density of Ireland, but only fractionally cheaper data. Germany has similar population density to the UK, but far more expensive data (though I wonder are they looking at all extant contracts or something; data recently got a lot cheaper in Germany).
All three countries have comparable household earnings. Sweden has a third the population density of Ireland (less than a tenth that of the UK!), slightly higher average data cost, _cheaper_ minimum data cost, and comparable household earnings.
In general, any attempt to explain this via recourse to population density, income or GDP fails in the developed world.
If you compare Australia and New Zealand for instance, there’s some very obvious factors that could explain that difference. Australia has a lot more outbound submarine bandwidth than New Zealand has, with New Zealand also being much further away from the rest of the world. Most of Australia has either no service or terrible service. New Zealand has approx the population of Sydney, while having more than 20x the land area. Australia has about 5x the population of New Zealand, so all of your fixed prices per customer are going to be less in Australia.
For any two countries you’re going to get an incredibly long list of factors that influence price. Population density seems like it should have a significant impact on the cost of building and maintaining mobile infrastructure for example. The US has close to 10x the population density of Canada, and Europe has over 3x the population density of the US, which I would expect is a non-trivial contributor to the reason that Canada is more expensive than the US, which is more expensive than Europe.
And if there is no competition, you no longer charge competitive prices, you charge what people are willing to pay. The whole promotional plans they offer are used to figure out how much you are likely to pay. Once the promotion expires and you don't call to get it extended, you are basically saying that you're ok with increase. Once enough people don't do that, the price will go up.
Also I'd say puts to rest arguments about wages/regulation being the issue.
There is also strict requirements on uptime and huge fines for telcos in western countries if the service goes down, even for just a moment. Needless to say that creating a resilient network costs a lot more.
(and $80-100 for the big bucket)
Median income India - $2k
Median income USA - $60k
So something like 10x difference
I'm not sure where you get $15. The linked site says $8:
"with 1GB costing an average $12.55 in Canada and $8.00 in the US."
Nor do I get why you think all of Asia is inexpensive. South Korea is far worse than the US, despite a far lower median income, at $10.94 average. If you adjust that to the US, it's more like $24 (200% higher than the US). And Japan is fairly bad vs global prices as well when adjusted for income levels (around $6 to $6.50 equivalent in US terms).
Why are US prices higher than they should be? Two primary reasons. First, the two big telcos initiated (and held) the market at a very high price point from inception. The US was the first large cellular and smartphone market. It has taken limited competition, primarily in the form of T-Mobile, more than a decade to drag those high prices downward.
Second, wealth / income adjustments. Consider the Ukraine example. The US has ~20 times the GDP per capita of Ukraine in a typical year. Their $0.46 cost is comparable to more like $9.20 with a US adjustment, which is higher than the US cost. US median disposable incomes are among the highest, only comparable to smaller affluent countries like Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland.
You also can't sell 1gb for $10 in Ukraine, it's not a very good business model. The people can't afford those prices. The telecom operators in countries like Ukraine do not make very much money selling mobile plans.
Most telecom operators around the world operate at very thin margins with low profits. Verizon by itself generated $30.4 billion in operating income in 2019. AT&T generated $29.4 billion in operating income. T-Mobile generated $5.7 billion in operating income.
So between the three US telecom operators, that's $65.6 billion in operating income every year (best compared to Apple or Microsoft in size). The entire rest of the world has nothing remotely like that profit bonanza, outside of a select few large operators.
But because you can’t just add more wires to the airwaves, there is a limited amount of bandwidth no matter what you do. So that’s fair.
They offer unlimited tethering still 512Kbps.
Another will be to bring down quality of service level. A couple of years back I was india and area where my mother lived had service down for like a week. That area must have a population of at least few 100Ks.
Third to have very little customer service staff. People here have legitimately said why the hell do I care about 1000s of customer service/call center staff. I want my service cheap. In countries like India they have done that. Social media call these companies evil but I think they are just trying to run cheap service.
Fourth is to spend much less on network equipments and field testing. Service is announced at much cheaper price point but backend systems are severely overloaded so one gets much more network/call drops.
In Canada they do that and keep the extra profits. Koodo is one of Telus’ flanker brands (for the illusion of competition) and even though they’ve increased phone and plan pricing a fair bit over the last couple of years they’ve gotten rid of the ability to directly call customer support.
The Canadian government has been promising us action in the mobile industry for ages, but year after year after year our prices go up and up and up.
A good starting point would be legislation that Israel enacted to get competitive markets as described by rvp-x:
> - Ban on SIM-locking of phones to one provider
> - Allowing users to change providers without losing their phone number
> - Ban on "exit penalties" for customers leaving a contract
> - Forcing existing infrastructure providers to share their infrastructure with virtual or not-yet-fully-deployed new providers
- Ban on SIM-locking of phones to one provider
- Allowing users to change providers without losing their phone number
- Ban on "exit penalties" for customers leaving a contract
- Forcing existing infrastructure providers to share their infrastructure with virtual or not-yet-fully-deployed new providers
However, it’s great the Israel has made it possible for infrastructure to be shared as a utility, allowing new players an easier entry. That will keep things competitive for a long time.
Overall, I was extremely impressed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX...
How come you stopped in Egypt and didn't go back to Morocco?
Tunisia is a great country to visit.
It is impossible to get a visa for Libya, and with the ongoing civil war the safety situation is B.A.D. Even if I got a visa, the Egyptian military wouldn't let me get anywhere NEAR the border. They're extremely protective of tourists and won't let them go anywhere "dangerous". They also wouldn't let me drive the Sinai over to Isreal.
Also, the border from Algeria into Morocco has been closed for years, and nobody could tell me what would happen if I showed up and tried to cross.
So, unfortunately Egypt was the end of the line on that one!
Funny enough, for the Sinai they don't care about me being kidnapped, they care about my Jeep being kidnapped and used by ISIS against them. So a good vehicle like my Jeep is not allowed across the Sinai, but they don't care too much (or at least you can talk your way through) on a motorbike.
The wallet cost of mobile data is lower than the inflated prices shown on the website.
Just like a hospital who charges $500 for a band-aid.
Wind has 20gb for $50, but it’s Wind :)
I always investigate here: https://forums.redflagdeals.com/ongoing-deal-discussion-f129...
Slow with mediocre coverage might be inexpensive but that waiting (and swearing?) comes with a cost.
But this can also mean that a single poor decision can leave you data less (or rationing) for the rest of the month. Most plans just lock you up until you pay more, rather than continue throttled.
Then you have software obviously written by people with zero consideration for data costs. NPR One app thinks it's a great idea to pre-stream hundreds of MB of content. Thanks NPR. Zoom doesn't have any low-bandwidth modes. While iOS lets you enforce a 'low-data mode' when tethering to metered connections, OS X doesn't. Thanks OS X for downloading that update while I was on a train. I was doing my best to ration what I had left by using Lynx for fuck's sake.
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.
I guess healthy competition can really be good for consumers when it works as it is supposed to.
I might as well get a SIM shipped to me from Italy every three months or so, it'll be lots cheaper.
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 than 33.3 per cent of the voting shares of a carrier’s holding company, and an effective total limit of 46.7 per cent (as long as the foreign entity doesn’t have control). On top of that, at least 80 per cent of the board members must be Canadian citizens.
* https://financialpost.com/telecom/tight-reins-leaves-our-tel...
See Telecommunications Act, Section 16. That dictates only domestic companies can really do much, which is the incumbents of Bell, Telus, Rogers, etc.
Reduce foreign operator restrictions and foreign operators may come into the market and provide more competition.
That and outright monopolies created by the government itself.
Which is why Bell Canada not peering at TorIX (and other Canadian IXPs) really annoys me. (Rogers, Telus, Cogeco, TekSavvy, etc, do.)
* https://www.cira.ca/improving-canadas-internet/initiatives/c...
Even major cloud hosting companies (AWS, Digital Ocean, OVH) have Canadian build-outs for folks that are sensitive to domestic/international issues, and yet if connect with Bell your traffic tends to go to Chicago and then back.
The result? There were some mocking offers in the form of double GB for the same price right after the meeting (ie instead of 10 euros/1 gb you'd get 10 euros/2 gb). After 1 year nothing more. The telecom operators think that we are in the 2000 where mobile internet is something that only company executives need...
I think the time has come for the government to stop asking nicely for cheap mobile internet and force the operators to align with the rest of Europe.
I have a 7GB plan despite using less than 1GB a month, because that's the next plan up after 1GB (and I like to have some wiggle room above 1GB)
Iliad is pretty great. Given that by law there are both a minimum number of players and incentives for the entry of a new players, Iliad managed to get pretty awesome pretty fast.
Also FYI it’s 4gb. I know because I just ran out of it.
I'm from the UK and pay £5 for unlimited data, which admittedly is better than most plans here.
What I don't get is they are selling wireless broadband at the price I mention above, but if you buy what is essentially the same product as part of a phone plan instead (i.e. they've simply packaged it differently), you pay something along the lines of 10x or 20x the price per GB.
TMobile -> Metro PCS
Verizon -> Visible
ATT -> Cricket
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.
Probably by using median as you suggested? Because it's impossible for mean to be less than 2.68.
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
Services not being available by region, that can be a bummer but that's not really a problem on internet service provider as such.
Also, I am surprised that one more country is building a GFW.
https://community.cloudflare.com/search?q=Pakistan
https://community.cloudflare.com/search?q=Iran
Likely helped by China too, considering it's Pakistan
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 one has do deal with in their daily lives.
Another way to cheaper price is that most jobs done in first world is to be outsourced to much cheaper places, which is happening. Or push lot of middle class jobs to subsistence level jobs, which is also happening.
I spend a few months a year in Mumbai, India.
I have a truly unlimited 300Mbps fiber connection as the primary source ($25/Mo), a second 100 Mbps connection from a different company as backup ($10/Mo) and my mobile LTE as the third backup ($10/Mo). AND my international roaming US Google Fi network as the 4th backup for $10/GB :)
This setup does work pretty well for me.The backups have come in handy at times.
My mom had slow DSL for years 6Mbps/1Mbps through the local phone company. They had stopped offering DSL to new customers for years.
I had to stay with her one summer while we were literally between places to stay. Our lease was up and our house was being built.
She got cable internet so I could work. She now has Had both DSL and cable for four years just so she will have backup internet and if she cancels the DSL she won’t be able to get it back.
4 days is pretty good turn around time for most US cities that aren't NY or SF.
My work is entirely online. I haven't worried about not having internet for a while.
Is it "travel" if you walk 30 metres? :)
I meant minutes.
I don't live in India, but if it happened in an individual building that sounds like perhaps this was due to management of that building and was just an isolated incident.
So, it's most likely that the cable got damaged due to bad weather (rainy season, laying out cable open to the sky), or the closest switch suffered a damage due to electricity fluctuations. These are the 2 main reasons for internet going down for that long. With me, it usually happens during a power cut. While I have UPS power backup and my router keeps running, it seems the local (geographical) area hub doesn't and internet goes down for 5 minutes.
What is a "Canadian internet plan"? Service is far different in rural Northern Ontario than it is in Toronto.
Firewalls and maintaining them aren't free. Cheaper to let it all pass through, especially when it isn't harmful to the network itself.
It's easy to underestimate how profitable it is to run a telco
Though my thinking is when selling censorship equipment to a country, you probably charge a country like .pk more because you know they'll find a way to pay for best-in-class.
This is why most countries have only a few "real" operators that own and operate infra, and tons of virtual operators (MVNO) that run on top of others' gear.
All for having an IP address originating from such regions with cheap internet that you can't do much with anyway.
However, I can definitely say that I have had to solve a lot of captchas and can recall at least one incident where I could only have been banned because I was from Pakistan.
You can thank bad actors for that arrangement.
It's people misbehaving that causes these types of ban and who are voting for pro-censorship government. They could remove these restrictions overnight if they wanted to.
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 provable) for $23 per month.
I wish the government would set reasonable pay per use data rates and make all the carriers abide by them. $12 / GB would be a godsend for low end, price sensitive users.
Note these are data-only plans, without SMS or calling. We use the Acrobits softphone (iPhone) or the built-in voip client (de-Googled Android) with voip.ms for
- Voice calls
- SMS/MMS (in-app, forwarded to any cell number, or via any email client)
- Transcribed voicemail
- Automatic call recording, and
- Spam-call blocking by configuring an IVR (spam callers can't press "1" to continue).
I've no relation to Acrobits, Fido, or voip.ms aside from being a customer, though I happily recommend all three.
Isn't Fido Toronto only or have they changed that? (it's been a while since I checked)
Also worth mentioning is this marketing thing where each of the major carriers own several cheap carriers. E.g. Roger's has: Fido, Chatr, Cityfone, Primus, Zoomer, and SimplyConnect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_mobile_phone_...
Current plans listed are 4Gb for $10/month, though they would require being paired with a voip provider, as I mentioned above.
Fido is available nation-wide, AFAIK. You're likely thinking of Wind. Originally available in select cities (such as Toronto or Vancouver), they were bought out by Shaw in... 2015 (?) I believe, and renamed to Freedom Mobile. They are currently available in most major cities, and rely on roaming in less densely populated areas.
[1] https://www.fido.ca/consumer/tablets
The real metric to be concerned with should be the cost of the first GB.
1Gb of internet in Australia ($0.68) is fantastic value compared to 1Gb of internet in Canada ($12.55). Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst the fastest in the world.
All the other brands you see are MVNOs running on mostly Optus and Vodafone, with the occasional one here or there on Telstra.
On a tangent related to that, though, I am very confused about exactly how Australia ended up with such a robust, competitive market when it comes to Internet services.
Importantly, Net Neutrality has never ever ever been a thing in Australia: Zero-rating content has been a thing since the 90s: when my friends had a blisteringly-fast-for-the-times 10mbps cable internet package (with, from memory, a 50GB shaped cap), you wouldn't bother downloading something until it hit the BigPond Games site, where the downloads didn't count towards your cap.
Even now net neutrality is not a thing: All of the physical network operators bundle in unrated Netflix or Spotify or, y'know, whatever. They compete on offering the best value-adds, as opposed to competing on crippling the service the least.
I'm thankful for it, but also it strikes me as particularly odd, in the current times where I expect literally every company to be essentially defrauding little old ladies to turn a buck.
Do any fellow Australians have any idea what the real reason for this is? Is it to do with the early legislation demanding Telstra's wholesale & retail structural separation? The mandatory (again, legislated) wholesale of ADSL by Telstra?
Why does Optus (read: Singtel) play ball? Is it because of the aforementioned issues?
I have so many questions.
It took a long time to force this, but aggressive competition by regional ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) forced Telstra to allow access to their ADSL network, and once that was in these and other companies used similar tactics to force open other markets.
Optus aggressively used MVNOs to build market share in mobile markets, and while Telstra still charges a premium the generally decent quality Optus network has kept a cap on how much additional they can charge.
The independent ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) had excellent reputations for customer service until they were all taken over by TPG.
Nowadays Aussie Broadband has a pretty good reputation and interestingly has basically followed the same model: not always the absolute cheapest, but competes on benchmarks like speed, and with an engineering-heavy management team.
The tl;dr summary of it is because it was a defence against Telstra's monopolistic practices.
Zero Rating developed because of a few factors:
Telecom Australia were the only providers of international internet connectivity because they owned all the landing points in the country.
Telecom Australia also owned the first comprehensive nation-wide data/internet transit fiber network around the country and to many cities.
Telecom Australia (which was originally entirely government owned) really didn't give a damn about competing - you either paid their price, or you didn't get connection.
I believe Optus may have had access on one or more submarine cables, but that was primarily for phone service.
Telecom Australia eventually became Telstra. They also built an ISP called Bigpond, which was their home-internet brand.
I believe it was Southern Cross Cables that was the first carrier-neutral submarine cable, and that wasn't online until mid/late 2000 in Sydney.
So, the zero-rating of data started as a way of letting Small ISP's customers download content from international sites, without it costing the ISP a fortune.
I remember pretty much every ISP had their own little quota-free services that they'd host themselves. Game servers were a big one, along with patches, mods, maps, movies, and even some would provide mirrors for the early music streaming services like DI.fm
At the same time as all this was happening, various ISPs were setting up and/or peering with the first IXs and allowing users to access services on the other ISPs for free. At first this was just within your state, but then some ISPs built up interstate capacity and allowed free access to content in other states.
This was coinciding with the rollout of ADSL, again which outside of the capital cities - was largely a Telstra undertaking at first. For Telstra, they already owned all the copper, fibre, and buildings to put it in - so it was a relatively cheap proposition. There was a lot of disputes between Telstra and ACCC over whether Telstra would be required to provide access to their copper network and also the ADSL Network, and under what terms. Eventually other ISPs won the right to install their own ADSL gear in Telstra exchanges (although Telstra screwed with that as much as possible) and so they built out/extended fibre networks to all the phone exchanges for this.
Telstra also made their own online services (Bigpond Movies/Music/Sports/Games/etc) quota free to their own customers. My understanding is that they still didn't do a settlement free peering for access to that data.
Optus effectively followed Telstra's lead in everything with few exceptions.
I think Shaw sees much better ROI from their last-mile captive DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable customers. Many of whom are on places where the local telco is years away from doing a real GPON FTTH overbuild. So it's 150Mbps+ DOCSIS3 service options vs 10-15Mbps ADSL2+ on long loop length copper.
I travel a lot, internet experience varies wildly especially in locations where restrictions are in place. For example typing this on a phone in a coffee shop in China, VPNd as for some non-reason HackerNews is blocked.
MBps has with it a lot of nuance, and then infra.
I lived in Canada for about ten years. It's a ridiculously expensive place in terms of food and internet costs. At the time I was pleased because the best connections we had in India were 1Mbps. When I moved back I was happy to see we had way better internet, digital payments and banking services.
Having the only difference be case was always bound to cause confusion. :/
Really? That hasn’t been my experience — and granted I’ve never lived in Australia or spent much time out of Sydney but I was there for 10 days in February and even though I paid for 4G Plus or whatever Optus calls LTE, speeds weren’t even comparable to what I can get in the US and were truly behind what I got in Seoul (where I was right after I was in Sydney). The only research I’ve seen that indicates Australia is amongst the fastest comes from research that is based on maximum speeds, not average speeds.
I can appreciate that Australia has robust cellular networks (assuming the user doesn’t live somewhere where they are forced to use satellite), in part because home internet speeds are so poor, but I wouldn’t put it in even the top 10 of parts of the world I’ve visited for internet speeds.
Optus is terrible. It's worth paying a slight premium for Telstra 4G. I'm on a 45gb cell phone plan for AUD$60 and it works everywhere, even in tunnels or remote areas, with speeds that shame my Fibre To The Building connection (though not in latency). My work laptop uses Optus and regularly loses connection despite being in an inner city suburb and close to a cell tower.
The post implies that they found a rate which was $2 for 20gb in the U.K. in their cheapest tarrif - which I assume was some sort of ‘unlimited capped at 200gb for £15’ style deal which would be heavily throtttled.
If I had to guess the prices probably have more to do with subsidies, general infrastructure quality and competition than resultant quality.
Now, after my trip, I went to India. I paid $10 for 1.5GB of data DAILY from Airtel (India's top provider) which also includes free unlimited calls. The experience isn't uniform (India is quite huge in comparison to Singapore) but within any tier A city, Airtel is MUCH better than Singtel. Also, the customer support is top notch for the peanuts you pay them and you can find an operator to talk to in usually a minute or less. For comparison, in Singtel, you would have to navigate the crazyily designed IVR and wait for atleast 5+ minutes before you can talk to a real person.
I'm just citing this example to prove that the most expensive 1GB isn't necessarily the best.
Singtel (the most expensive telco) has multiple plans for visitors (100GB for $12 + 500mins talk + 1GB roaming + $3 to spend on public transport). If you want prepaid month to month, it's still nowhere in the stratosphere of $10/GB.
Also 4G coverage is virtually 100%, buildings and Faraday cages aside. (source: living in Singapore for 10 years, through 3G to 4G migration)
This is from Singtel Hi menu:
https://i.imgur.com/z6WmqYx.png
Notice it says "Data plans" - They give you only data and claim to give you free incoming only for 20 days as a bonus. That's not even a bonus, in India, you pay nothing for incoming, at least on the Airtel plan I mentioned.
Also, about your point on being expensive - Singtel is the only Telco that doesn't suck in terms of network coverage in the country. Starhub is a close second, with slightly cheaper plans depending on what you're after and M1 is garbage and everyone knows that.
I suggest you try 4G somewhere near Toa Payoh, Bishan, Bedok or even some places within Paya Lebar.
Not sure why you had to be so rude (5 minutes of research?) and created a new account just to contest this..oh well.
One of the nice things was that each telco would keep changing their plans to be better and better so it paid to pay attention and change plans whenever a better one came along.
I’m with Singtel and don’t have any problems in those places. I even had 4G on Pulau Ubin today. Singtel has a $25/20GB plan for locals, $10/1GB isn’t really representative of typical plans.
My criteria isn't just having 4G, but able to actually use it in decent speeds. This is where Singtel sucks for me - the 4G logo will show on your phone, but pages will never load due to poor connectivity, even with 5 bars. I had this issue across three phones - iPhone, Sony and Samsung.
Singtel ALSO seems to do lot of throttling on videos depending on where in the city you're as well.
As other posts have pointed out, $10/GB is not right (tourist plan or not). If you lived here long enough to know what the rates are, why misrepresent it?
https://www.zong.com.pk/internet/mbb-plans
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...
They should consider that in the next "study".
Most expensive in the UK $64? That's insane. Would be interesting to see where the sources of these prices were. I downloaded the spreadsheet but it just tells you the numbers, not the providers.
In Romania everyone is on Whatsapp. It has basically replaced text messages.
Actually, any widespread messaging app is better than the original text messages. And don't even get me started on MMS.
Nobody uses SMS anymore.
India still has a long way to go in terms of social equality, poverty and breaking up the caste system, but providing fast, cheap Internet for all is undoubtedly a great first step.
I have seen this first hand with so many of my educated friends and relatives who were reasonable folks before internet boom and now they come across caricature of dimwit person. With so much information available on internet they still chose to pick lowest quality sources.
It brings up an interesting question, though: Assuming for the moment that internet access actually increases hatred - is more hate towards a group a good tradeoff for empowering them by giving them internet access as well?
The elder generation believes some WhatsApp forwarded message so easily that WhatsApp and Facebook are political propaganda machines. Google about "Whatsapp University" meme. I honestly wish anything should not be allowed to be forwarded more than N times where N < 4. And I wouldn't care end to end encryption breaked on forwarded messages in order to fact check them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jio
Hopefully unlike free they don't become entrenched players resting on their laurels.
I moved out in 2017, but I'm glad for the LTE access that my parents can use from the same tiny city (with DSL Line, now at 1mbps as an alternative). It's great! Indeed, lots left to do about other issues, but I think we get to be happy about this particular development.