I'm in a top 10 most expensive city in the world (Canada) and the best I can get for $50 is 80 Mbps (and even that is only available as a promotion that you can't get by simply going to the ISP's website and buying a plan).
I'm in Vancouver and paying about 55 CAD plus taxes for 300Mbps. So it's possible to get a bit more for similar money. The downside of that is however those are not available as regular offers, and you constantly have to deal with ISPs and rention programs to keep the price down. Even had various events where the ISP randomly increased the price inside one month, until I gave them a call and ask to fix it again.
This price randomness never occured to me in germany, and just booking a fixed low price on a website was so much more convenient.
I'm in Vancouver, BC and paying 80$/mo for 1Gbps symmetric. I could get 2.5Gbps but it would be about twice the cost - and I would have to get something that can do 2.5G link speed on an SFP+, not many devices can.
I've looked at the smaller ISPs in my area and they're terrible as far as pricing goes. Both the "major" options are still using Rogers' last-mile infrastructure, they offer poorer customer service (because of the previous point), charge the same or more money for the same level of service and offer no real incentive to switch. Having talked to some techs at TekSavvy, none of the smaller ISPs can offer anything interesting like synchronous speeds over coax/DOCSIS because they have little/no control over how the last-mile infrastructure is run. For that same reason they can't offer anything faster than 1G down either. It all feels like smoke and mirrors, and the CRTC seems to have a vested interest in keeping internet prices sky-high.
Yeah the last mile stuff is still owned by the majors, but at least the choice exists.
As much as Canadian telecom seems to own the CRTC it isn’t nearly as consumer unfriendly as when I lived in the US.
I had an apartment in downtown Seattle which had 2 choices for internet. Many of my friends were quite impressed since most addresses are only served by one ISP.
The US has around ~10-12 times the disposable median income of Thailand (2019 figures), and ~10 times the GDP per capita of Thailand (2022 IMF estimates).
It's like a typical consumer in the US spending $500+ per month for broadband. Even worse if you consider the rural income factor. Absolutely insane.
For a fraction of that you can get 1gbps from Comcast and you'll never utilize most of it in 99% of consumer situations.
I'm in a small quasi rural 'city' in the US, hours away from any consequential city, and I can get 1.2gbps from Comcast for 15-20% of the income adjusted rate in question referenced for Thailand.
It seems common to forget how astoundingly high US median income, disposable income, and GDP per capita figures are compared to the rest of the world. The latest 2022 estimates are pegging US GDP per capita at nearly double that of France and Japan. To match up on median disposable income figures, you have to use hyper affluent countries like Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway as references. Then people come on HN and proclaim how they're paying only $20 per month for Internet access, in a country with 1/10-1/5 the median disposable income of the US. The US is more expensive than it should be for Internet access (better telecom competition would go a long ways toward fixing that), however the reality is US income figures are also a lot higher than most of the developed world.
That’s not a reasonable comparison for Thailand food prices as food isn’t disposable income. World bank says GDP per capita PPP was 18,232$ in 2020 down from 19,233$ in 2019. Of course that’s not evenly distributed, but rural vs urban incomes mean costs are higher in cities than median income suggests. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
Where your number comes into play is for people pricing Netflix subscriptions.
GDP PPP per capita is an extraordinarily low quality metric.
You end up with absurd examples where Botswana is comparable to China; Russia is comparable to Greece; Puerto Rico is comparable to Spain, ahead of Portugal, and just a bit lower than Japan; Kazakhstan is just a bit behind Latvia and Slovakia; Taiwan is far ahead of Finland, France, UK, New Zealand.
It’s just a question of what you’re trying to use these numbers for.
Imputed rent for example is one of those things that’s kind of silly on the face of it but makes various comparisons more reasonable. On the other hand it can also imply a great deal of economic activity that isn’t actually happening.
PPP is the same sort of calculation. If rents crash because a great deal of housing was built it can make GDP comparisons kind of meaningless. The country has more tangible wealth, people are better off, yet GDP falls. That’s not what you want the number to represent.
Both Nominal and PPP are out of whack if you are looking to learn about conditions on the ground. GDP measures the production of a certain country (and it's a very bad metric at that). Some countries are wealthy because its people make money from foreign sources. This is usually displayed by a high and chronic trade deficit.
That means you can have two countries with comparable GDP per-capita, where one of them have a more affluent population and able to pay higher prices.
I’m just wondering how good of a measure it is comparing the median incomes of different countries. If a there is a country A with 10x median income of some other country B , then the people of country A are really 10x more affluent than that of country B? especially if they pay 10x for everything?
Where do you spend 120 baht a meal? That's a restaurant meal, not the average meal. I don't spend more than 60 baht in Bangkok. At $7 (250 baht) you're talking about a night out (maybe except alcohol), way off of the "average meal".
I worked in BKK since 2016 and office staff usually goes to the cheapo restaurants (which I frequented too), so 40-80 baht is completely common also for white collar workers. But meat, vegetable and oil quality is really shady in that price range.
I prefer to order grab of around 120-200 baht from a "healthy" place or going for restaurants within Central 200-400 baht per meal.
I love the tightest lifestyle eating rice and 1-2 side dishes from street vendors who deserve the money rather than foreign investors to extract money from the economy like leeches.
The funny thing about rice with something, most of the time you want to add an fried egg too (more likely like + 10 bath charge). Crispy Pork is about 10 bath more expensive than the other. I think 40 bath is like 5 years ago pricing. You can still get it somewhere. 50-60 bath is more standard now.
But is that within the city / country, or to outside the country, too? International bandwidth can be completely mediocre compared to local bandwidth. What I do is change the Server in speedtest.net to one in New York / wherever I have business in and test it out (from Hong Kong).
USA requires more raw materials to provide services. United States is about 19 times bigger than Thailand.
Thailand is approximately 513,120 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km, making United States 1,816% larger than Thailand.
And then there is the duopoly of ISPs where they carve out huge chunks and agree not to compete.
I live in a metro area in the US and thousands of homes in my community do not have land-based broadband options. The US incumbents have totally failed and it isn't because there's a lot of desert in the West and Alaska. I'm sick of this argument which doesn't explain why city dwellers in most places in America have the worst internet in the developed world.
Yup, I live in San Francisco proper, and my only choice is Comcast cable. Looks like the current promo pricing for 1200Mbps is around $70/mo, but I can't quickly find what the normal price is. And I assume the uplink is something abysmal like 25Mbps.
(I'm on Comcast's Business service, $250/mo for 1000/35 [long dumb story why]. Most of the time I see under 600 down when checking on speed test sites, and real-world speeds downloading large files rarely exceeds 250. I expect real-world speeds on the non-business service are even worse.)
It's pretty embarrassing that this is the state of things.
pop = {'USA': 329,000,000, 'THA': 70,000,000} #as of 2021
gnp['USA'] // pop['USA']
65805
gnp['THA'] // pop['THA']
7027
Seems more like a distribution of resources issue... so why not jack up taxes on the wealthiest 1% and use it to pay for things like high-speed fiber in all the rural areas? Doubtless this would lead to economic growth?
FDR's Rural Electricity Cooperatives did a lot to electrify much of the midwest and rural south, along with the creation of the TVA. I doubt anyone would want to rely on the current major providers, Comcast etc., who have such a bad track record, to accomplish this. Municipal broadband sounds like a better option:
> "The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, enacted on May 20, 1936, provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve isolated rural areas of the United States. The funding was channeled through cooperative electric power companies, hundreds of which still exist today. (wiki)"
There are fair few places in the US where the local power company also owns a fiber network and provides (relatively speaking) super cheap gigabit or multi-gigabit internet service
However there are just as many places where the state's government was bought off to ban such networks because the majors are afraid of actual competition.
Don’t forget the existing providers have already received massive funds to ‘improve rural broadband’ in the same vein as that act. Hundred of billions of dollars if I remember correctly.
Sheer size isn't what you should compare. Population density is much more relevant. Granted, Thailand still comes out ahead, but by far less than your size comparison (33.6/km^2 vs 132/km^2)
