Cost of any cellular related thing in the US is among the highest in the world. I don't know of any other place where you pay to receive calls and texts. Vendor lock-ins are rampant.
I was going to buy a smartphone but then decided against it because I figured out that the cost of the plan alone would set me back $40-$60 whereas I pay 25 dollars for approx 1.5 months on my prepaid plan.
Paying to receive calls is annoying at first blush, but it does have at least one benefit: you're far more callable. With other systems, low level employees at many businesses simply won't be able to. (I've seen this first hand in Australia and Mexico.) This is likely penny-wise, pound-foolish on the part of those businesses, but no less real for that.
Having to pay to receive SMSes, on the other hand, is hard to justify.
Just remember that complex systems emerge as often as they're created upfront, and you'll feel better about it all.
I don't but only because I haven't had the chance to compare plans / prices. Anyone know of any good ones? Ideally I'd look for something where there is no contract lock in and I'd pay as I go.
Before the iPhone 3G came out, it was impossible to find reasonable data plans here in Canada. The only options were $30/50MB plans intended for Blackberries.
What a difference two years make. I picked up my iPhone 4 this morning - 32 GB, for $40 less than the same model in the US. (3 year plan, unfortunately, but eligible for full upgrades in < 2 years) The data plans provide 6 GB/month for $30, with tethering included free and a $10-20 option to share the quota with a 3G iPad.
What changed between 2008 and today is that the iPhone is now available from all three major Canadian telcos, whereas Americans are still stuck with AT&T.
Sadly only data and no explanations. I would especially like to know why the price is so ridiculously high in France. From my very superficial knowledge about the French phone market I always assumed that it must be very similar to the German phone market (I’m from Germany) which has among the lowest prices.
My hypothesis for the low prices in Germany? Fierce competition.
Also, the HN title is somewhat misleading, as the report is not just about 3G data, but about 3G data plans for notebooks and tablet computers.
In many European countries, the 3G data plan one has in combination with a mobile voice subscription is a lot cheaper per gigabyte.
For instance: in The Netherlands, the cheapest iPhone plan includes 150 nationwide minutes for outgoing calls (all incoming calls are free), sending 150 text messages (receiving messages is free), and unlimited 3G data at 2 Mbit/s --- for only Euro 30 ($40).
At first I thought that it was because of the extra demand in the US (being more developed that most of the world), but the same data being offered for as little as ~$0.50 just confounds me. It's probably just the effects of a monopoly at work, although it would be interesting to see more data and analysis.
I would think that regions that have the most mobile phone users per square mile and that are the closest to major Internet hubs would have the best rates. So to me, it would make sense for 3G data to be more expensive in rural Alaska than in Queens, NY.
Then again, it might have more to do with taxation and government subsidies, as is the case with the huge difference in the pricing of gasoline worldwide. In The Netherlands, you can expect to pay $7.52 for a gallon of gasoline, while in Venezuela it costs only $0.19.
I think you're onto something with the region idea. All the major carriers offer nationwide plans because people expect to be able to travel pretty much anywhere and still have their phones work. That means that we all foot the bill for putting towers all over our insanely-large country because one day we may run out of gas in the middle of Nebraska and need to make a call.
The European nations, Japan, etc. are all much smaller and more densely populated, so the cost of covering the countries with towers is lower per person.
31$/mo. for iPhone4 + 13$/mo. (dur. 2 yrs) for unrestricted 3G data until 1 Gb transferred, after which the speed is capped to 64 kbit/s.
or
26$/mo. (dur. 2 yrs) for HTC Desire including unlimited 3G data with unrestricted speed, free phone calls within the same carrier (covers over 1/2 of all Finns) and 2400 min of free calls/mo. to other domestic carriers.
translates to
44$/mo. for iPhone4 with crappier plan vs. 26$/mo. for HTC Desire with fully loaded plan. The difference is gigantic, but iPhone still sells like hot cakes.
Text messages cost 0,13$ apiece (single unit price for the most expensive carrier, median is lower)
Phoneless deals in Finland: 1Mbps 10 eur ($13)/mo, unlimited speed 14 eur ($18)/mo. Both with no data caps. Phone calls 0.07 eur/min and SMS 0.06 eur apiece. Oh yeah, and you get multiple sim cards, eg for your phone and netbook.
Yeah, the iPhone contract seems like gouging. I brought our unlocked phones in from Australia and just pay an off the shelf Elisa/Saunalahti unlimited data plan. Cheap, works great, including tethering.
Switzerland in contrary has pretty high prices compared to other EU and smaller countries. So the competition between the carriers is also an important factor. We have 3 big carriers here and one is in big amounts owned by the government.
I pay additional 16 bucks to get 500 MB (!!!) data for my plan...that's pretty high although we're a small country
Switzerland is the same size of The Netherlands (16,000 sq miles), but the two differ in some important ways: Switzerland is very mountainous while The Netherlands are completely flat, and there's only 8 million people living in Switzerland versus 17 million in The Netherlands.
So it doesn't surprise me that Switzerland has higher rates -- there are less customers per square mile, and I can imagine it being a bit harder to put up a cell tower on a mountain slope than in a meadow.
This is pretty misleading. They assume that any unlimited plan = 30GB. It looks like most plans are still in the $20-$30 range, it's just that a lot of them are unlimited and counting as 30GB, or have an official cap so high that the carriers sell it knowing that on average <10% of the cap will be used.
For example, Drei in Austria is $1.31/GB. Great! Let's replace AT&T's plan for $2.62! ... Oh, that's only if we get a 15GB plan for $19.59? That's a little better, but way less better than the graph makes it appear.
Anyone know if there will be true compatibility of LTE hardware on the US networks? This would finally bring real competition and put an end to this problem.
I was once at a sales presentation where someone borrowed my GSM modem and used it for less than an hour. He was just trying to load a web portal. Bill came up to $600. My carrier called me in the afternoon to make sure that was me.
There must be some kind of business opportunity here. The concept of virtual operators that have no hardware of their own, just a brand, can they not make deals with operators all through Europe and offer sensible data-rates everywhere?
The phone operators are scared shitless that people will run VOIP over their smartphones and so get to a much lower effective rate per minute than what the operators charge at the moment.
Typically a VOIP stream is between 2400 and 9600 baud, or 300 to 1200 bytes per second. At E0.25 cts per MB for instance that would make their voice tariffs look ridiculous and people would switch en-masse to VOIP.
They can't really win this one, either people will not use their data networks and they end up in front of the anti-competitive agencies (OPTA etc) or they lose a pile of money on their voice side.
I have heard this presented as "telcom companies do not want to be reduced to be a bitpipe".
It is a fear I find to be mistaken. Even though a bit is a bit any way it is transferred, things like latency, jitter, guaranteed throughput, those are things that do make a difference to applications.
If I was a telcom company, I would start to write android applications that besides providing VOIP and streaming video, etc, also would set up these connections to use a QoS level that the subscriber would have as extra charge add-ons to their account. QoS might require lots of technology on the server side that isn't there yet.
If I was an evil telecom company, I might even introduce jitter on non QoS and make VoIP completely crappy quality. Making people that pick this route sound like real cheapskates. Aren't you glad I am not a telecom company?
I was going to buy a smartphone but then decided against it because I figured out that the cost of the plan alone would set me back $40-$60 whereas I pay 25 dollars for approx 1.5 months on my prepaid plan.