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In Finland the average amount of data transferred per SIM card is 17.3GB/month (twitter.com/mikko)
187 points by caiobegotti on Oct 11, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 184 comments



I've got unlimited mobile data for a great price in spain as well. Honestly, I hope the us catches up at some point because software still doesn't even consider it an option - I have to actively fight all my settings so I can get updates, backups, streaming at high quality and the like because the OS considers they should always be done on wifi.

Sometimes, the situation has been so absurd that I've had to use the share Network function with a friend's phone to fool my phone into believing I'm on wifi so I could download an update.


Just a decade ago, SMS messages in the US cost 10 to 25 cents per SMS. You also got charged for spam SMS. Prices were completely disjointed from the reality of underlying costs (zero for the telcos). My college CS professor gave senate testimony on this: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/keshav_testim...

(side rant: in the following ten years, the tech giants sweeped in, competed, provided a better service, with better cross-platform support, for zero dollar immediate cost to the end customer -- gained a massive following (think whatsapp), and are now vilified for their "monopoly" and the "harm" it has caused.)


>You also got charged for spam SMS

Wait what? They charge you for receiving text messages or am I not reading that right? Do they also charge you to receive phone calls haha?


Correct, before 2011ish, you were charged for SENT and RECEIVIED messages. They often had "plans" where you would get 100sms/month or 250 sms/month, or a-la-carte. If you got an SMS spam, that counted to your allotment. SMS was so expensive compared to GChat/YahooMessenger/ICQ/etc that I didnt use it. But then you were on the "a-la-carte" plan of 10 or 25cents per message depending on your provider. Godforbid you sent an international SMS, those were 50cents a message and MMS (SMS with image) was 5o to 75 cents per message. My provider had no apparent way to not have the service, so you were essentially bullied into paying a-la-carte or bullied into a plan.

Friends would get angry at each other for sending a message, or breaking a sentence into two messages.

Again, I think it is INSANE that half the US legislature is trying to fault WhatsApp (100% no dollar cost) for being a "monopoly" given the situation that was fixed. https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_dig...


The major problem with WhatsApp are that they joined forces with Zuckerberg.

Low sms pricing was on its way anyway since the cost of one byte sms was like 10 000 fold to ip data.


Yes. In the US, cellular calls are charged by air time so you pay for incoming calls as well. I think all plans are unlimited these days though.


My plan has unlimited text, but only 100 minutes of talk (which is almost always plenty).

My Mom is still on a strict per minute plan, with a stored value plan though. I think she gets free incoming text, but has to pay for calls or texts she sends.


Checkout Mint Mobile: $15/month if you prepay for a year otherwise $20. You get unlimited talk and texts, 4GB data. https://www.mintmobile.com/


Good if you're single but if you have family something like Cricket's Unlimited Basic gets you unlimited (22GB before throttling) data and talk/text for $25/line for four lines is better.


As an aside, as a single person I feel the discounts that come with family plans to be weirdly discriminatory. I go with prepaid TMobile (10gb for $40) because it’s much cheaper than a regular(?) plan with only 1 line. But to hook my Apple Watch up to cellular, I need the regular plan ($75 for one line + $10 for Apple Watch) as prepaid tech is years behind and second tier (most MVNOs included). That means that the only way I can use an Apple Watch on cellular as a single person is by paying $45 more per month. Complaining about an Apple Watch is a first world problem, but I think the pricing system is unfair.

I really wonder whether young members of the family consume more or less data, or what other reason could be used to justify family-discounting.. but it’s probably like a parent comment said: there’s no correlation between costs to the carrier and price the consumer pays; the single/family split exists to create the maximum profit off both groups by penalizing single people and convincing families to add all younger members to the plan (even those that might not need it). IMO carriers should give an age discount for under 18, not a per-line reduction the more members are in your plan.


They say "Family" but that's for marketing. If you have friends you trust to pay you, they don't actually check social security numbers or anything.

Cricket wants as many subscribers as possible, so they give discounts to groups of four.


I've had every single Apple Watch since the original one and never had the need to get cellular for it. What's the use case for when you got a watch on you but no phone near it (but still NEED to be reachable somehow)?


Running. Phones are massive these days and impractical to take running. Still need to be reachable for any number of reasons (or call if there's an emergency).


People who want to run without water or any kind of fanny pack. I bought an Apple Watch and got a cellular plan for it and quickly realized there was absolutely no reason I really needed it.

(It's also true that I long predate cell phones--and also am often in places that don't have cell phone coverage--so I really don't have the mindset that I always have to be reachable right now.)


I got the cellular version to make tech detoxing easier. I find I can think more creatively when I leave my phone at home when going on walks. With a watch with cellular I could see myself regularly going weekends without my phone.

What I’m doing in the meantime is popping my sim from my smartphone into an old Nokia.


there are still 'per minute' plans. I still have one for a family member's "emergency" phone.


Yes that is how it used to work for sms. My first cell I had to convince people to not text me because I didn't pay the extra ~$35 a month for texting, which I think got you 500 monthly texts. Friends that didn't know or when it was "an emergency" would send a few texts and cost me extra couple bucks a month.

For calls you used to get a pleasure with a set amount of minutes, such as 200, 500, and 1000 per month. Most carriers let you "roll over" unused minutes and typically anything after 9pm didn't count. Though I remember cingular offering 7pm as the unlimited time if you paid an extra fee (don't remember the cost).

Slowly larger plans, then unlimited became more normal. I can of remember it becoming more cost effective the same time more people were getting internet through cable or dsl, instead of dial up. So 2002-2005ish?


> Though I remember cingular offering 7pm as the unlimited time if you paid an extra fee

I also seem to remember that if you started a call at (for example) 6:59pm, and it lasted an hour, all 60 minutes were "premium" minutes, not 1 "premium" and 59 "free/unlimited".


There was also the trick where "nights and weekends" minutes would start later and later. Initially they were so you werent doing long business calls on them. "Free Night" minutes would start at 5:30pm, then crept to 6pm then to 6:30pm and eventually to 7pm


That just sounds like lazy programming becoming a feature for the chief revenue officer ;)

Call call = new Call(timestamp);

String hour = call.getHour();

if (hour < 19 hour && hour > 6) call.setRate("Premium"); //military time


If you started a call at 5:59 AM (or whenever it was) would the entire call be discounted?


LOL that would be like AOL in the 90s when people would log on and not log off...because it was so busy and because there was unlimited use pricing.


somehow I doubt it. I don't remember, but I strongly doubt it.

this would have been 'revenue maximization', much like banks that will order your check deposits and outgoings to maximize any fees for bounced checks. Process the outgoings first, so if there's any fees to be had, you can rake 'em in.


Yes, even now you'll still see a notice in many places if they ask you to opt-in to receiving their text messages, notifying you that you may be charged for them. I guess some plans may still have limits.

And yep, they charged for calls you received too: You might get 500 minutes of talk time under a given plan, and incoming calls counted against that. I think my first cell phone plan in 2001 was about $50/month for 400 minutes, no texting because I couldn't afford a phone that supported it or the added cost in the plan.


> Do they also charge you to receive phone calls haha?

Yes, that's how ridiculous the US and Canada systems are


Yes you used to pay for incoming calls as well. Now most plans are unlimited.

I guess the rationale was that there is no difference in the numbering plan in North America between cell phones and land lines. Calls to a cell phone cost more but the caller has no way to tell they’re calling one. So the caller pays the same to call a cell or a landline and the callee pays to receive the call too so that overall carriers get more money for completing allegedly more expensive cell minutes.


That's not true, there were definitely blocks of numbers which were and were not allocated to cell providers. Anyone implementing a "prefer landlines, fail over to cell" system was able to do so. Ask me how I know...


Yes. Just to clear things up this was a big surprise to me as a european the first times I visited the US.


I'm not surprised, that really does boggle the mind.


We do the same thing with internet in the US. E.g., if someone sends me an email, I'm the one that has to pay my email provider for handling it, and I'm the one that has to pay and bandwidth costs to download it from my email provider to my computer.

Isn't that how it works elsewhere?

If so, what is mind boggling about the US using the same system for other communications networks besides the internet?


In most of the world, the caller used to pay (or maybe still pays in some places?) extra for calling a mobile number. This is easy to arrange and clear to the caller since mobile numbers are in a separate area code range. As I understand, in the US mobile numbers use the same area codes as fixed numbers, so this isn't possible. Receiving a call on a fixed number in the US is still free, I suppose?


Where I live I pay one bill, and that gives me unlimited bandwidth on my home fibre connection, mine and my wife's mobiles, and unlimited minutes and text messages. I've used the same free email provider for 20 years!

>what is mind boggling

What's your phone number? I'll txt you every 10 minutes for a month. And you'll pay for it. Like it or not. Mind boggling.


Not really the same, you pay your ISP the same regardless of how much (or even if) you use email.


The key word there is "competed".

Everyone is aware that it's not some benevolence of one company over another but actual market operation that brings down the prices. That's why Apple's ability to impose restrictions and take a 30% cut of unrelated transactions is concerning: there's no market for competing Apple stores.

(There have been telcos that tried to ban VOIP, but not in the West)


Decade ago I used 20GB monthly on 3G SIM. It was on plan mandated by Irish goverment to bring internet into rural areas. Sometimes you need regulations to break monopoly.


Fair, but what do you think of the discussion above. I lived thru all that. The discussion shows how bad things were. Then competition came in with amazing products. Now were' vilifying the competition for being too good.


I sort of remember somebody calculating back then that the total cost per byte of SMS messages exceeded the cost of the sending data through NASA's deep space network.


Yes! I hate the fact that iPhones don't update or backup over mobile. My unlimited mobile data is 300mbps compared to my fixed 100mbps. Why, oh why has Apple not allowed me the option of using my mobile data how I want to?

I've got my mom and grandpa on same mobile plans without any fixed connectivity and the only time their iPhones backup is when I visit and hotspot them. It's crazy!


That's because Apple cooperated with the cell carriers to help them reduce the data usage from iPhones so that the carriers would push iPhones to consumers.


Fwiw, this was a relatively minor point of cooperation compared to the concessions Apple has extracted from carriers.


Phones are smart enough to know that shared networks are mobile behind the scenes and treat them as metered data too. You have to go into the wifi settings to disable that feature and force it as unmetered (how that works and whether you can even do it depends on the phone vendor...)


I'm curious, how does a phone know the WiFi is metered?


I believe this is what the comment is referencing: https://android.stackexchange.com/a/220981


There's also the Microsoft probe/beacon extension that exists.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/mo...

I don't know what iOS is doing, as they still didn't have proper data metering and limiting the last time I checked.


It is possible to detect but it’s not necessarily detected by most OS features or most apps.


I have been thinking for many years, why doesn't Apple works with Carrier on this.

OS Update ( and may be App Update ) Download should happen during Midnight when everyone is asleep ( when the network is quiet ) and those Data should be exempt from their Data Allowance.

There are increasing amount of people with no WiFI or Wired Internet connection at home. ( Mostly because how convenient Mobile Phone and Network has become ), but they still need OS update. Software and Apps still take the view many features requires a WiFi.

5G will massively improve Network Capacity, but at the current rate of things it still take at least 4 years for most of the iPhone users to be 5G Ready. Which means we wont see any of these WiFi by default changes in the foreseeable future.


The reason is hopefully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality. Otherwise you soon get a network with all the big player’s services being „free“. This makes competition with them even more difficult.


I remember being really annoyed that there was like a 20 or 50 MB limit for app downloads on the iPhone 3GS when I got it. I had unlimited 3G data, I didn't care how big the application was, just let me download it.


> I hope the us catches up at some point because software still doesn't even consider it an option - I have to actively fight all my settings so I can get updates, backups, streaming at high quality and the like because the OS considers they should always be done on wifi.

Interesting, because until recently I had the reverse problem. I had to fight everything on my phone (and occasionally, my system) to stop doing updates and backups over mobile connections, because those were always limited in Poland. I'm not sure if anyone truly does offer an unlimited plan here (other than bullshit "unlimited, but we'll throttle you down for the rest of the month after a gigabyte or three"). Bottomline: it's not just US. I think most of the world doesn't have ubiquitous unlimited mobile data.


But it‘s not just about unlimited data. I wasnt able to download a podcast bigger than 200MB during vacation, because it requires you to have a wifi connection. It just doesnt let you.


Don't buy an iPhone if you want to be able to make these kinds of decisions for yourself...?


I’m not throwing shade but I’m genuinely curious what the infrastructure cost per user is when comparing Europe and US and Canada. Surely it might be part of the problem.


Probably more down to limited competition in the US, honestly. Comparing costs across Western Europe, it’s hard to make the case that it’s an infrastructure cost problem; Germany (dense) is more expensive than Ireland (non-dense) which is more expensive than the UK (dense) which is more expensive than Finland (very non-dense).


Well there are multiple factor involve, so population density isn't always of the main concern. The main cost of infrastructure is actually the rent, of any land / property cost required for the Cell. In Countries where Mobile Network already owns the land for these Cell Site / Tower that were paid and amortised during the 2G / 3G / 4G era. They are now essentially free. In Cities, that depends on rent and property pricing, unless you have government mandate or directly involved like in China. It is also dependent on the fear level of radiation in the culture / nation. People will protest to get rid of Cell Site in their own area ( While at the same time demand their Mobile Phone to have perfect reception ). Which also drives up the cost of finding and setting up Cell Sites. ( Or they are willing to put up with the risk of radiation if you pay them more ).


Do you consider the cost of frequency bands a part of infrastructure costs, or is that separate?

https://www.dw.com/en/fnord/a-49168657 was the top hit just now when I searched for 5G auctions. I've no idea how much telcos pay in other countries, but the top six hits for my search were all about Germany, which at least doesn't suggest that Finland is raking in record sums from its auctions.


It's probably not a big factor. If we look at last time round, Ireland, a country of 5 million people, got 450 million in the LTE spectrum auction. Germany, a country of 83 million people, got 5.1 billion. So per capita the Irish spectrum was almost twice as expensive as the German spectrum, and yet mobile data is generally cheaper in Ireland (despite lower density, generally higher labour costs, and other factors that would lead you to expect it would be more expensive in Ireland if cost of data was actually determined by input costs).

When it comes to it, 6.5bn _sounds_ like a lot, but it's only 78 euro per capita, and that's buying the telcos permanent assets which will be useful for decades to come.


Thanks. Yeah that does sound plausible. Canada suffers from anticompetition too.


Maybe it used to be? I don't know, but not anymore. Mint Mobile will get you unlimited talk/text and 3GB data for $15/month, no extra fees. They're an MVNO using T-Mobile's network. If T-Mobile can make money wholesaling their network to Mint, and Mint can make money selling plans at that price, there's no reason for a "normal" plan to run $70 before taxes and fees. Even Mint's unlimited plan is only $30, less than half of what TMobile has.


Typically the catch with MVNOs (and prepaid products under the main brand) is that they don't roam; you get only one operator's towers. In urban areas this is not a big deal but if you like road trips it can matter.


The US does have higher labor costs than most of Europe, but lax regulation of special access service (backhaul) is probably more of a factor.


huh? What's your source?


The over way around is also annoying: what if you have a limited connection but you are on WiFi? Say, you share from another phone using hotspot feature.

Some tools allow to control this, but others will update the shit out of your mobile plan as soon as it can see wifi.

On the other hand I mostly like how roaming was solved in Android phones I had. It allowed me to choose which apps can use it and constantly monitored current usage of each.


That's odd, I feel like I'm always fighting my phone to make it stop using data. It's really my top complaint about smartphone apps.


That's how the apps make their money.


Which is a problem, because honest people make money in exchange for providing a valuable service - not by stealing your resources from you to steal your data from you, and make money off giving that to malicious third parties.


How much does it cost you and what's the average speed?


I just made one of those online speed tests and it came up at ~45mb/s. Not sure if that's representative, but the important answer is that it's good enough that I never feel it's a bottleneck.

As for price, I've got 3 mobile lines with infinite data plus my home wifi at 600mbps and the whole thing costs 100€/month.


Which service do you use?


> Over here, unlimited mobile data means unlimited mobile data.

This. Although India has the cheapest data next to Finland, the ground reality is quite different.

I tried using 4G as my primary internet connection after COVID, and I got frustrated by "hidden" limits and random throttling from the ISP - ended up getting a fiber line.

The 4G modem was a complete waste of money.


I really wish the US could institute some legal framework against deceptive advertising. Unlimited should mean unlimited, not throttled.

If you are offering a 20GB plan, just say you are offering a 20GB plan.

I've tried to use a 4G hotspot to setup my laptop and do work in outdoor parks but the number of times I can do that per month is limited.


This kind of thing was forced upon Australian telcos, and it's great for consumers.

For example, they can no longer advertise the "up to" speeds, they have to use the "typical evening speed", which is what's more relevant to the actual experience.


It doesn't apply to LTE plans though - at least that I've seen.

If you want an interesting test, find someone with a Telstra post-paid plan, and get a Boost Mobile SIM in another phone. Run speedtests side by side. Boost, although it's technically Telstra Pre-Paid, seems to be heavily throttled.


I thought it was well known that MVNOs are on lower QoS/prioritisation than the carrier's own main brand(s)?

A mate works for Optus and had for a while a bunch of different iPhones of the same generation for testing.

Each had the same OS version/etc.

One on Optus Business, one on Retail Postpaid and one on a reseller (iirc Virgin).

Speed tests side by side were pretty interesting. You could quite clearly see the business service was getting prioritisation over all the others. Retail was generally better than the Reseller by quite a margin. Some locations (like shopping centres) would restrict the reseller from working at all, and retail would be clamped down on bandwidth.


Does it actually impact speed or just QoS? I'm on an Optus reseller network and basically can't see any problems - 1080p streaming and Duo video calls work without and with low latency. Even if I'm prioritised lower than business, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.


It definitely affected throughput.

i.e take the phones out, and run all the speed tests at once - the business plan was guaranteed to run faster.

It wasn't like it was an issue with one particular phone just being better - you could swap the sim cards between phones and no matter what device the business sim was in, it got the best throughput.

How they actually implemented it I don't know, all we could go on was based on some testing from an end-user perspective.


I should've been more explicit. I meant, does it impact speed in a meaningful way? Once we can send+receive real time high quality video stream on a retail plan... Does it matter that is slower than the business one?


It'll depend on your use case, and your location and other conditions.

It wasn't done as a "isn't that interesting" thing, it was because of some specific problem with a client that was reporting poor performance.


I have a legacy Telstra plan that allows unlimited data, it's truly unlimited.


Assuming that you have the Ultimate plan as I do, have you found a way to get a new phone on it without losing the amazing roaming privileges?


I don't think so :(.


I've long thought those should be legally pro-rated. Based on distance and signal quality there's a "per user" number for all of these. If you said "X" but based on my distance you can only give me 0.75X then that's how much I pay.

There should be a real financial incentive to upgrade their lousy infrastructure.


> I really wish the US could institute some legal framework against deceptive advertising.

Trouble is that the politicians are some of the worst offenders when it comes to deceptive advertising.


>Unlimited should mean unlimited, not throttled.

Throttled is still unlimited in the same way as any other connection. Your connection is always throttled, it's just a question if there are two different speeds with the latter triggering after a particular threshold.


On many carriers you get only 2G speeds after you hit a certain point. I consider that disingenuous and deceptive to call it "unlimited" data when 2G speeds are basically unusable for most modern apps.


If there is a threshold then it's not unlimited!


That’s just semantic trickstery.


Legal frameworks are mostly there to help the people / companies with the better lawyers.

What you are looking for is competition, and lower barriers to entry.


Do you have any examples of competition leading to more honest advertisements? It seems to me that it mostly leads to a race to the bottom that just optimizes for hiding your dishonesty better.


Of the top of my head: grocery retail in the UK and the impact of the German hard discounters Aldi and Lidl.

The UK used to be famous for really confusing strategies, like bogus discounts (50% off on an item that's just priced 2x normal), or buy-3-get-5 offers, that sometimes mysteriously wouldn't be registered at checkout.

The UK regulator often dinged the supermarkets for such behaviour, and gave them various stipulations. But as far as I can tell, they only really got better when Aldi and Lidl seriously started taking market share.

Aldi and Lidl have a very German no-nonsense approach to advertising. There's a single simple price that you pay.

Similarly in the UK, the regulator always told off the retail banks for their bad behaviour, but they never really changed their tune much. I am hoping that challengers like Monzo are changing that. (I left the UK nearly three years ago, so I don't know how retail banking has come along in the meantime.)

UK retail banks usually advertise that their accounts are 'free', but then have lots of hidden fees. Monzo doesn't have those hidden fees. (Eg when you try to make a transfer when you are out of money, Monzo just fails your transfer. My previous British retail banks charged you for that. And they typically gave you an 'unarranged overdraft' that you couldn't decline.)

Keep in mind that these are two examples of the top of my head. You can probably find more with a more scientific inquiry.

> It seems to me that it mostly leads to a race to the bottom that just optimizes for hiding your dishonesty better.

Do you have any examples of that?

Competition usually leads to customers getting more of what they are willing to pay for. Of course, that's not always what customers say they want, if you ask them outright.

(Eg Starbucks sells well. But what they are selling is not what people say they value in coffee.

I wouldn't call that dishonesty on Starbucks site. People pay for having a spot with free wifi to idle or work while sipping some acceptable beverages. People who go to Starbucks are not there to satisfy a distinguished taste in coffee. But Starbucks advertisement compliments on their good taste, anyway.)


It's tricky because for 98% of consumers, "unlimited" is unlimited enough. The realities of operating a mobile network mean you will be throttled when there are a lot of users in your cell so that your Youtube stream drops from 4k to 480p so that someone can browse their Facebook feed. How to advertise this so it isn't deceptive? I'm not sure.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/E2dmfnSarDI?feature=oembed


The bitrate you get when on "unlimited 480p" is typically 1.5Mbps.

The bitrate you get when most plans throttle is 128Kbps, less than a tenth of that speed.


Nothing is infinite however. The concept of unlimited is never correct without disclaimers.


That's just a distinction between "as much data as you _want_" and "as much data as you're _able_" to download though. I think the latter fits better into a common understanding of the term "unlimited" as it pertains to data usage, especially when the pricing tiers are explicitly based on max throughput and thus have an implicit max data transfer volume.


Well, it's limited by the advertised max speed times one month (per month).


Indian here. I just use the 3GB/day plan + 50GB top-ups when required. I get a constant 40-50Mbps. My monthly average is around 100GB. Internet cost is around $8 for 55 days. 50GB top-ups cost an extra $4.


Yeah, same plan. Maybe the throttling is region specific.


I'm using my Jio hotspot as WFH occasionally. It works well, can't say I've hit any hidden limits. Just need to be careful not to blow through the 2GB daily limit by watching some Youtubes.


>ended up getting a fiber line.

This seems like the market functioning correctly. People who can be hardwired should be hardwired, so that scarce RF spectrum is available for those who don't have an alternative.


I'm not sure an economist would call that a case of a well-functioning market. The parent poster pretty much gave up on a product because the information asymmetry made it impossible to choose something that could satisfy his/her needs, and to compare options. If there had been an option to pay maybe twice as much for the subscription to get a reliable connection while saving the cost for establishing fiber, wouldn't all market participants then have been better off?


Economics is seldom about absolutes.

It's about trade-offs. Ie how much would it inconvenience you to be hardwired vs the other guy? How much are you willing to pay?


I’m sure there is a price for which you could actually saturate an LTE connection around the clock, but it would be a “we’ll fly out some engineers to sit down with your engineers” kind of deal. Not offered through a mass market consumer sales channel.


Depends on the market, I guess?

Saturating the connection between your handset and the LTE cell tower shouldn't put that much of a strain on the fibre glass backhaul of the tower.

At least where I live, I doubt it would warrant flying engineers around some planes. (But then, you'd be hard pressed to find a domestic hardwired connection below 500 Mbps. 1 or 2 Gbps are more common for domestic connections here. And we have some spots with faster than gigabit LTE connections.)


Your argument might be null though, because I still end up paying for mobile data, so I can use it outside my house.

And the tariff here is kinda rigged to make you buy data. The economics don't work out unless you subscribe to a daily data plan in addition to the voice plan.


If you dropped the second sentence your comment would be a fine statement about the united states and market failures.


Can confirm I've had a similar experience, especially recently. A 4g hotspot worked perfectly for my work from home situation up until July. Post July I started seeing significant degradation in connection quality on Zoom calls that didn't occur on a WiFi network in the same house.

Plus reduction in overall speeds beside Zoom during specific times of the day almost like clockwork, this too in recent months also made me feel that there is some hidden throttling at play.


That may be just saturation, which isn't rare if a lot of people is connected to the same BTS. Your ISP can do little to nothing about it.


This is a good use case for a VPN.


UK here. I pay £20/month (USD $26) for unlimited data, voice and SMS.

I have two such SIMs, one for the home router (because it's cheaper and faster than FTTC) and another for my phone.

Usage varies, but on a busy month the home SIM will see 100-300 GB, mostly for Netflix. The phone SIM sees about 10-30 GB.

Speed varies by time of day, but at peak it's 90 Mbit/s down, 20 Mbit/s up. At the slowest times of day it drops to about 8 Mbit/s down. The phone is faster than the router, so I've occasionally switched to using the phone to download something large.

Last time I checked, there was technically a cap on the monthly data of 3 TB. For a while they also limited tethering to 30 MB, i.e. using the phone as a wifi hotspot, and then (if they detected it) you could theoretically be charged a lot for tethered data over that cap. But they officially removed that restriction a few years ago.

The links are a bit unreliable. But the FTTC connection I had before was more unreliable, and more than twice the price. The FTTC connection before that was nearly three times the price (gouging - it started out cheaper than quietly kept increasing a lot). And if I move home, I can take my link with me now, instead of being tied into a 12 month contract at a fixed location.


Interesting, do they actually use the term FTTC during marketing? As far as I am aware, FTTC is just VDSL2 up to 35b or G.Fast ( or Cable DOCSIS 3.1 which isn't popular in UK ).


I originally wrote ADSL in the comment, then realised that was misleading because it wasn't old-school ADSL to the exchange. There's a fibre component and it's still worse than 4G for my needs :-)

So I edited the comment to FTTC for clarification. When sold it was probably just "Superfast Broadband".

Looking at marketing now, I see "Faster Broadband", "Fibre Broadband", "Superfast Fibre", "Ultrafast Fibre", "Fibre Optic Broadband"... It's impossible to tell from marketing whether it's FTTC, FTTP or something else.


Yes they use the term fttc. It's vdsl up to an 80/20 profile.

Docsis is very very popular, virgin media is the only national Docsis network and accounts for a significant portion of urban connections (though less than the percentage that would trigger a competition breakup like bt)


as another data point: my FTTC was basically perfect, 110mbit sync, dropped maybe three times a year

I was sort of sad to replace it with FTTP, which has been slightly more unreliable


> if they detected it)

How can they detect that?


The post at https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/47819/how-can-ph... offers some explanations.

I'm pretty sure I've come across different APNs being used before (on the Giffgaff MVNO using O2s UK network), but don't recall the details.


Interesting, didn't know that.


Who are your providers, and did you have to negotiate these tariffs or do they come as standard offerings?

Crucially: how long are you contractually tied to your cell provider?


Unlimited deals are fairly standard in the UK (though the signal in my area is far too slow to consider it).

https://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/compare/sim_only_deals/


When I visited the UK for a couple months in late 2014, as soon as I landed I bought a random sim card (I think the provider was "3 UK"), and for £15 a month I had unlimited internet data. And no contract, it was a monthly rechargeable plan. I'm sure they're even more available now. In Italy now most of the mobile providers give 50GB/7€/month.


The left side of the chart is a surprising cohort, hardly the usual suspects when it comes to being behind the curve. There’s the US, sure, but it’s actually slightly ahead of Norway, and significantly ahead of both Canada and Japan!

You have two Scandinavian countries on opposite ends of the spectrum, two east Asian countries on opposite ends, and even two countries with significantly large landmass (look at Russia only two spots short of Korea). What gives?


I don't know how the numbers on this chart are created, but in Japan, the largest mobile operator (the former government telco monopoly) charges €55/mo for a plan with 60 GB of data, which should put it much further to the right. It says "median plan cost" so I wonder what terrible under-specced plans they've dug up for the comparison.

The Japanese government is concerned about the high prices and low competition and is currently in the process of having the legacy telco parent company (with 30% government ownership) re-acquiring the mobile operator. https://www.lightreading.com/5g/ntt-to-reacquire-docomo-for-...


I can answer as a homegrown Canadian. Canada suffers from oligopolies in many industries, telecoms being one of the big ones.

Before I moved away to the US I was grandfathered into a $80CAD 8Gig/month plan and that was actually considered VERY good compared to what was available. Now in the US I pay $50USD for unlimited and burn through 25 gigs a month.


I would not care too much about the chart as it doesn't really state anything about what data it's based on.

If your Norwegian plan includes just 1GB data and free everything else then the price is probably at least twice the amount in the chart.(~12€)

If your plan has 100GB then a normal price would normally be ~0.46€/GB.

According to the definition written on the chart, you get "unlimited" data(1TB+) for 46€/month in Norway using the biggest provider. Data is a lot cheaper in Norway than the US, that's for sure.


That chart could mean just about anything. If a country has most of its plans with very generous data but expensive/limited talk, and vise versa, the data plans won't appear on the chart because they don't have 1000 minutes or might not affect the median because there might only be handful of them, even if they're the most popular. With only the notes shown, it's pretty much meaningless.


>You have two Scandinavian countries on opposite ends of the spectrum

The three Scandinavian countries are not really on opposite ends.


I live in Singapore and estimate my monthly data usage is around 20 GB / mo.

I pay about 15 USD/mo.


Do you stream a lot of video or something? I can't figure out how people reach these figures. I mainly use my phone for Web browsing, podcasts (mostly downloaded at home), and chatting, and never remotely get close to these figures.


The way you exceed 10-20+ gb a month is by being so used to having such a high cap if any that you don’t even bother to turn on the WiFi when you’re at home.

I too live in Singapore and the internet infrastructure is excellent. Currently I’m sitting at about 10gb/month on 4g without YouTube/Netflix/social media. I do use a fair amount of Reddit though. I don’t really want to go back to having to care about how much data I’m using.


That makes sense. My Internet connection and especially WiFi (yay Unifi!) at home are quite great though, whereas cell reception in my apartment building is quite spotty, so WiFi is the obvious no-brainer choice for when I'm at home. And these days most of my phone usage happens at home because of WFH, so yeah, not much mobile data consumption. Even before then though there wasn't much; I don't tend to watch streaming video when I'm out and about.


I never exceeded 1GB of mobile data, personal and work combined, literally ever. But I can totally understand how one reaches these figures without doing anything weird: video call meetings, video streaming while commuting or traveling, music streaming throughout the day, maybe also work via tethering when not in the office or at home... it's just that one can choose to not do these things.

On the one hand, I feel like I'm preaching and practicing abstinence by doing things like downloading videos that I want to watch in the bus ahead of time over WiFi. On the other, long-range mobile data only works because we're not all using it at the same time, that's why we we meter it per month: it's a poor man's way of limiting concurrent usage while allowing bursty traffic and keeping the limits understandable to consumers. If you use a lot of data or need a lot of bandwidth reliably (e.g. IT company), running a local network yourself is the obvious way to go today. But with small cells coming to a bus stop near you, and seeing just how easy mobile data is compared to WiFi that can be out of range more easily (or you may be connected to a faraway access point), can be down and nobody is on call to fix it (in a company, someone might be on call for WiFi, but at home?), etc., it seems clear that for 98-99% of people and 90-95% of companies, using mobile data exclusively is the medium-term future (let's say around 2040).

And if it is the future, and since I use anywhere between 50GB and 2TB per month in data on my home internet connection (not counting others in the house), mobile data will need to handle such figures per person as well. More, even, because it will be in the future.

Someone having a 20GB+ mobile data plan is not exactly weird to me, even if with a little bit of foresight you can limit your usage to 1-2GB a month (and that still allows for quite a bit of video calling and occasional videos on the go) and save a bunch of money in 2020 (something on the order of subscribing to both netflix and spotify premium).


IG killed a gb for my cousin in about 2 days. How have you not done this? Streaming not required. We checked it before and after setting the save bandwidth option. It did 100mb in maybe 10mins of scrolling


I use around 15 GB/mo out of my 60 GB/mo plan

Looking at my mobile data usage (which hasn't been reset since August), the top apps are 5 GB YouTube, 3 GB iOS system services (mainly document sync), 2.5 GB tethering, 1 GB photos app, 1.5 GB Twitter, 800 MB LINE messenger, 800 MB App Store, 600 MB music, 500 MB Safari, 500 MB Instagram, 350 MB Podcasts, etc etc


Being fairly active on social media; especially GIF or video heavy websites will see you churn through 1-2gb a day easily.


There are also clients that can just download those gifs while you're on WiFi for later consumption.

I'm not saying you should do this, just that it's also quite easy to save 90% of your data usage without reducing media consumption if you are so inclined.


Just watching one movie or ~2h sports game in a hotel with crappy wifi (so you use your 4G) in HD, will eat quite a bit of data. Same if you watch netflix during a 2x30 minute commute every day.

Obviously if you don't watch video it's extremely hard to get close to these bandwidhs on a smartphone.


I mean, if you're catching the train or bus, is it that unusual to want to watch a few YT videos or a 25-60 minute episode on a streaming service? I suspect most people who avoid it are doing it for data reasons.


> is it that unusual to want to watch a few YT videos or a 25-60 minute episode on a streaming service?

To want it perhaps not, but do you see people do this around you? I've seen more people gaming (laptop and mouse) on a train than people watching streaming video on the train. There have been more people that watched videos but when they pause for the conductor it's virtually always VLC or WMP, revealing that it's pre-downloaded. (I know VLC can do streaming but I'd have seen buffering here and there and they're much more likely to use the service's own client because of DRM.)

So while I don't say it's weird to have that desire (it would certainly be easier not to have to plan this ahead), yes, it is unusual in the Netherlands. And now that I live in Germany I'd say it's not just unusual but impossible, given their mobile data network coverage.


>I've seen more people gaming (laptop and mouse) on a train than people watching streaming video on the train

My experience has been different. Sydney, Australia for reference - our data costs are relatively low at about 0.68 USD per GB (down from 1 USD or so last year if I were to guess). When I've looked around on packed trains in the past, about a third of the occupants were watching YouTube or Netflix (very rough estimate). Although obviously this strongly depends on where you are - for instance, when I was living in Japan, most people would be either playing games or reading news.

>revealing that it's pre-downloaded

Sure, but is because that's the way the prefer it, or is it a workaround that they've resorted to due to high data costs? Behaviour is a symptom of circumstance just as much as it is of desire, if that makes sense.

The argument I'm trying to make is that it's not that it's not that there's no demand, it's that the low supply results in people pursuing lower cost/higher effort alternatives.

Edit: But I'm not trying to say you're wrong. It's definitely interesting to hear what happens in the Netherlands and Germany. I appreciate your input.


As a regular video creator and consumer who tethers mobile data, I'm using about 100GB/month.

My total mobile bill is 700 Taiwan dollars a month, which is about 25 USD.


In Russia I pay $2 for 100 min + 11GB of traffic which I never use (less than 1GB each month) because of WFH.

It'll be around $3 for unlimited traffic though.


what's WFH ?


I assume "Work From Home".


I’d love to see Switzerland’s avg usage.

For $30 a month true unlimited where you just don’t even think about data transfer.

Speeds in the 100 MB/s range most of the time and people seem to just take it for granted.


I'd like to know it as well. Considering Switzerland is generally an expensive country, we have very reasonable prices for mobile subscriptions, mostly due to the large competition in this area.

I personally average on about ~12GB per month. I pay Fr. 37.50 per month for unlimited calls and sms in Switzerland and unlimited data in Switzerland & the EU.


Granted, I had to drive an hour then hike an hour more last time I experienced it, but even Swisscom's net has holes.


I moved recently and had to tether for ~a week while my ftth was being relocated - ended up using around 80GB of data in that time. Normally I use less than 6GB per month.

I would be curious to see how different mobility patterns in different places (e.g. I live in Singapore, where commutes are naturally short) affect mobile data usage vs. other more obvious factors like home internet penetration.

It feels like I use much more data when I'm back in the US or working on site, even if I have a fixed base to work at, just because of the amount of time I spend moving around.


New Zealand reporting in here, the cheapest plan for unlimited mobile data is around 20 USD/month, but you need 4 people committed together to get such rate. A true independent unlimited mobile connection will set you back $45 USD or so with first 40GB at full speed.

Realistically speaking the 20USD/month is already quite reasonable, if world as it was pre-COVID I might coerce some friends and family to join the plan with me.

But I really would prefer 25 USD no strings attached.


Also, no limits on tethering (hotspot wifi).


Is home internet common in Finland? Or does everything connect to the cellular network?


My perception may be biased, but I'd say it's quite common to have 10/10 Mb/s connection included in the rent and many opt to upgrade it to 100/10 for 10-20 euros a month (roughly 12-24 usd)


Many vendors make routers which have 4G modem which then send out a WiFi signal + have Ethernet ports.

In rural areas the ADSL prices started climbing up a few years ago and most moved to cellular (60 euros for 21Mbps ADSL vs 25 euros for 50Mbps 4G). As of recent fiber connections are getting good in rural areas as well, so people are switching to fiber (40 euros for 100/100Mbps, 60 euros for 1000/1000Mbps). People who have both 4G router + fiber are quite rare.

In my experience some channels on 4G are quite ossified and during peak times you might even get a better throughput on 3G.


Almost everyone I know from Finland has home broadband as well. Mostly due to home computers and less than ideal indoor cell service.

There was some switch to 4G for home internet (with mifi/usb dongles) as well, mostly due to aggressive pricing some years back. It was a good alternative to ADSL and cheaper, but became congested once a lot of people started using it. Yet, fiber is much more ubiquitous these days and is much faster and cheaper than either of those.


Cell service is excellent throughout Finland. I’ve been in remote parts of Lapland and summer cottages and streamed f1 over 4g. Your mileage may vary but pretty much everywhere I get minimum 3G. Cellular is ubiquitous so unless you’re living in a bunker coverage will be excellent. I believe 100mbit is even a human right here?

If you live in a city there’s probably fibre laid down. Anywhere outside unless your neighbourhood pay for the fibre to each home you’re going to have to get a cellular modem :)


>Cell service is excellent throughout Finland.

Sure, but I have 2/4 bars on both of my SIM cards in a ground floor apartment. It's pretty common considering how insulated the walls are. This is why the biggest speed tuneup you can do to your 4G router is running an antenna out of the window.


I don’t know the answer to your question, but back when I had unlimited tethering with fast 4G, I would basically just have it on all the time to use my laptop on the go and treated it like home WiFi. So even though I would have home WiFi and be connected while at home, I would still rack up 10+GB of usage monthly. That is to say, I can imagine hitting 17GB could be common every month even with home WiFi depending on the culture of usage.


What drives the high cellular prices in the United States? Is it regulation? Infrastructure cost? Lack of competition?

I don't buy the lack of competition argument honestly. Cellular data is a commodity. Cell towers are not exactly a utility to the extent that optical fiber/coax is. If there was margin to be exploited, capital would have flowed in to take advantage. But it's likely that the risk adjusted return in the cellular business is already too low to attract more players and drive down costs without a significant technology moat.


I’m glad I live in taiwan now. Back in the states my internet sucked, both mobile and home.

Now I use my phone as a mobile hotspot and do my work on it. I use about 30 or 40 gigs a month when I’m not at home.


It's a good thing that with EU's "Roam Like at Home" people from Finland can go transfer those 17GB/month in any other EU country, but people from Romania saw the introduction of "national" SIM cards which leave you literally stranded (no signal) when crossing the border. Better roaming for me but not for thee.


We don't actually get unlimited EU data here. DNA offers 7–15 GB a month (unlimited in the Nordics and the Baltics), Elisa 13–30 GB a month (unlimited in the Nordics and the Baltics) and Telia 4–25 GB a month.


This reminds me of the Homer Simpson quote: "We should exchange insurance information. I have none!"

The average Romanian would cross the national border and notice the phone have NO signal. No data, no GBs, no voice, only 112.

Truth be told we have only been in the EU for the past 13 years...


I'm not sure we should see unlimited 4G plans as a positive. 4G consumes a lot more enregy than Wifi for the same bandwidth, so usage of Wifi should be encouraged when possible.

(https://whatis5g.info/energy-consumption/)


I'm on the T-Mobile Connect 2GB plan with unlimited talk and text. I was paying $50 a month for basically the same plan but thanks to one of the Sprint/T-Mobile merger conditions they have to offer it for $15 now.

I don't like to watch video on my phone, I almost never hit the 2GB limit unless I try.


In Taiwan, pay about 1000TWD or 33 USD. for the 80mbs unlimited data 30 day plan(no contract). Never throttled always fast even when in far away tea mountains like Alishan. If I took contract its 700 or 23 usd/month. Unlimited meaning yes you could download 24/7 it won't cap.


Sweet. What percentage of this is ad and analytics networks? YouTube ads? Mobile apps love to binge on data.


I have some hope that Amazon and SpaceX will force prices to go down for at least home internet by bypassing the ISP monopolies. Might be a while though if ever. Google Fiber has sadly fizzled out because of the anticompetitive practices of the local monopolies.


I would maintain some hope for municipal fiber. Our local power company deployed one carefully, and was very successful despite repeated suits by the cable-internet provider. Eventually the ISP fought back at the state government level which limited the fiber's expansion, but lots of rural areas launched their own using similar models. Apparently the cable monopolies didn't feel it was worth competing for rural areas, meaning a number of farmhouses, hours away from cities, have better service for cheaper.


Starlink won't be usable in urban areas.


That cost per GB chart is interesting--how can Portugal be 5x more expensive than Spain, or Japan be (what looks like) 30x more expensive than Korea? Are there hidden subsidies or costs driving this or is it from infrastructure, policy, or historical reasons?


Lack of competition, generally.


I average 2gb because I restrict myself since the rates I get are outreageous here in the US... I use wifi whenever I can to limit mobile usage (which is of course not included in the 2gb figure).


Meanwhile, checked just out of curiosity, I used 640 GB in past 30 days. That's just my PC. Then there is wife's laptop and cell & kids laptops & cells. I suspect my household "eats" every month 1 TB of data. Not that we care anyway.


> Meanwhile, checked just out of curiosity, I used 640 GB in past 30 days. That's just my PC.

I am curious how you manage this? Are you torrenting 4k movies continuously?


Yup, something like that.


I was talking about mobile data... my PC uses cable and the limit per month is 1-TB before I get charged extra...


I typically use less than 300MB for the same reason. It's too pricey for my taste, so I just use only a little bit when necessary. Honestly, waiting for wifi isn't that bad and I can download most of my work in advance.


Will neighborhood 5G change up the internet availability landscape in the US? I pay $70 bucks a month for cable internet which is oversubscribed and sucks in the evening.


So judging by that graph, the median Finn pays way less than 1 euro per month for cell service?


See, I just see that as wildly inefficient. Why do I need to stream videos on the go? If I listen to music, why wouldn't I have it locally?

My usage is usually right around 1 GB a month, and I'm constantly on my phone, social media, browsing, etc.


yes especially with music, most of the time I'm listening to the same songs and only listen to new ones maybe 10 or 20% of the time


Exactly! I'd rather buy a handful of new tracks a year at $1.29 each than pay for a Spotify subscription.


Finland is a tiny developed country it probably has good fiber or coax penetration both of which offer better latency than 4g.

So what gives? Its similar to my usage pattern, only time I use mobile internet is when I am out of WiFi range


Not that tiny, same area as Germany but with 1/15th the population. Maybe fibre penetration isn't so good, I know Finnish telecom really sucked before the cell networks.


> Finland is a tiny developed country

Maybe you're thinking of Iceland (population 364,000) rather than Finland (population 5.5 million)?


For comparison Finland is almost exactly the same size as Colorado both in population (5.5M vs 5.7M) and area (338k km² vs 270k km²).

In terms of population only Finland sits between NYC (pop 8M+) and LA (4M).


Based on the NYC reference I assume you mean Los Angeles and not the state of Louisiana? The City of Los Angeles is kinda irrelevant to what's considered "Los Angeles", and the Greater Los Angeles area that most people would consider to be all part of "Los Angeles" the place they call home is just about 19M residents.




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