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, 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?