This site is useful and informative but I have a problem with their statement in bold. From what I understand, they use the cheapest plan that satisfies two conditions - it provides over 500MB of data and is valid for over 30 days. They present that this is the _best case scenario_. This is false of course, cheap plans have often a shitty value ratio. For example in France you can easily get 50G non-renewable contract for around 20-25 euros, SFR even offers 100G for 20. Maybe these are not the cheapest plans you can get, but they have much better ratio than what this site presents as a best case scenario for France (which is ~$0.1/MB)
From June onward there will be a new EU legislation which would make it so that you can use thee whole 100GB in the EU (under small roaming restrictions).
The site and data normalization are great. The problem is that applying the phrase "best case scenario" is simply false, and it is just a distraction that was not necessary on the site.
Amortizing my entire data usage over my entire cell plan (which includes talk & text), costs me literally $0.001/MB.
You should not present $0.24/MB (US|Prepaid) as the "Best case scenario" when someone on a standard AT&T plan pays 240x less.
I've been traveling more so i've been studying data and usage as it applies to my personal usage.
The result: I've had to completely turn off cellular data for web browsing.
I can use mobile apps fine; chess.com, slack, telegram, email, etc. Streaming even pandora is out, but luckily they have an offline mode that allows you to download your station when you're on wifi and then play back whenever. But I can't browse the internet at all.
I'd be willing to spend up to $50 a month for a limited package, but at most that seems to get me is 1-2GB when I'm in Canada unless I want to sign another long term contract.
Every page i download, every news article, easily 2-3MB, and when your total data allotment is 500MB, you just can't browse the internet. Even hacker news, a popular post ends up being 1MB worth of comments.
> Every page i download, every news article, easily 2-3MB,...
That's typical, and completely insane. I run an image-heavy (but ad-free) blog using standard Wordpress, and the 8000-word homepage is around 1.1 MB on first load. I would never use a cellular data connection without aggressive ad- and tracker-blocking.
(FWIW, HN seems to have about 3x markup overhead, 2x compressed, for a typical comment page, which is not that bad.)
>I'd be willing to spend up to $50 a month for a limited package, but at most that seems to get me is 1-2GB when I'm in Canada unless I want to sign another long term contract.
I guess Canada doesn't have the population to scale the cost down. It's a huuuuuge country with a big spread of people.
$50 for couple of gigs is insane. I pay $50 with T-mobile for unlimited everything except international calls. You could say unlimited for 20 gigs before I get a bandwidth cap which is still usable. LTE speeds are faster than my home Internet with Frontier Fios
I don't think it has anything to do with size or population. Compare Canada with Australia. Canada's area is roughly 10 million km^2. In 2015, the population of Canada was ~36 million (3.6 people/km^2). Australia has an area of 7.7 million km^2 and a 2015 population of 24 million (3.1 people/km^2).
These numbers don't even take into consideration of the fact that 75% of all Canadians live within 200 km of the US border. Assuming the population in the south subsidizes the cost for expanding to remote locations it's hard to believe we need to pay as much as we do.
Canadians pay too much because the big companies like Bell and Rogers control the networks and push out competition. They charge as much as they want and we just accept it.
I currently do not own a cellphone (even though I'd like one) because I'm not willing to pay the fees.
The issue is that whenever resellers pop up in metropolitan areas with great prices they get aggressively acquired by the big players and prices stay up.
I'm just not sure how this works. AFAICT there's four networks in Canada. Why would they onsell their network, then have to acquire the company to stop the competition? Why not just not onsell it in the first place?
Maybe there's some regulation saying they have to onsell it?
Just curious because it seems a bit similar in Australia.
I was with Vodafone then discovered a much better deal through Kogan which uses the Vodafone network. I asked Vodafone to match the deal to keep me as a customer, and they couldn't! They wanted me to pay something like 30% more for the same network/data usage. I told them thanks but no thanks.
e.g. Public Mobile would have a small network that operated only in cities and metropolitan areas. Unlimited data, unlimited talk time over the entire Canada and unlimited text messages. This cost me around $35/month. Telus purchased them and changed it down to 1gb of data and incrased the price to around $40-45. They killed all the Public Mobile physical stores and made it so that getting support was a pain.
A few month ago every Public Mobile clients received a SMS. The SMS was a promotion to switch from Public Mobile to Koodo. We would get the same deal we had right now (or better price), a new cellphone and $150 in Koodo store credits to get goodies. Everyone switched over. Right now I'm on a $50/month plan with Koodo that is worst than the $35/month PublicMobile could give me.
Now nobody offers unlimited data or Canada wide data for $35.
(Disclaimer: I have a bad memory for dates and prices. This should however describe the situation correctly enough.)
Firefox for Android has an option to disable images when using data.
Opera has an even more powerful data saving tool, with the caveat that the data goes through their servers (no privacy). I can spend 20 minutes browsing the news, and end up with just 3-4 MB used.
We can all agree the Web is a giant mess when it comes to efficient bandwidth usage esp for mobile. TCP protocol will restart over with single packet when a packet gets lost rather than optimising for throughput.
The worst offenders are ads and tracking. A fuck ton of bloat that needs to be loaded. Every little action results in a http call. If you visit a page with disqus comments it loads every ad tracker it can find in the world and shove it in your browser.
> TCP protocol will restart over with single packet when a packet gets lost rather than optimising for throughput.
It will back off to an earlier window size. It won't just jump to 1 packet. As of 2010, the default initial window size is 10 packets across OSen, so it's unlikely to ever get to 1 packet unless you're on a really lossy network.
I've been playing with using safari content blockers to not load images/other resources when on data. See https://github.com/jacklightbody/Data-Diet
I'm curious if anyones found any better alternatives though, as it's definitely not an ideal situation
Though they did get bought recently, so if like me you have a warm feeling towards the company historically, you may want to re-evaluate that. Especially as using mini necessarily redirects all your browsing via their servers (in order to compress it).
Wow the prices people pay in here are exorbitant. I have a UK no contract SIM and pay 25 pounds a month, this includes uncapped internet and quite a number of texts + minutes. I pretty much only use it for the internet as it's such good value.
The best thing about it is that the uncapped internet works in pretty much any EU country I've been to. This is really surprising from UK as most of the stuff in there is usually more expensive than in the rest of the EU, however I don't think I've ever seen a plan with uncapped internet and free roaming in any other country.
I pay $14/mo for unlimited 100Mbit/s home internet + 120 channel home TV + 12G mobile data/mo + 1000 min and 500 SMS local cell (stock offer from ISP). This is compensated by the fact that I live in Russia though.
> uncapped internet works in pretty much any EU country I've been to
This is merely providers trying to be competitive and gain market share before EU abolishes roaming fees on 15th June [0].
A lot of providers I've seen have in the small print a limit for the time you can spend outside the home country (e.g. Three with their 'Feel At Home' limit you to two months a year abroad), so it'll be interesting to see what they come up once this comes into effect.
I'd be very surprised if my €5/month 'unlimited' (fair usage) 4G will really be unlimited throughout the EU.
Last year, I had a 3 UK data sim (30pounds, 12 gig, 1 yr) that travelled with me, and it was good. Ireland was fine, France was fine.
This year, I got a new one, and once I cross into Ireland it's throttled pretty badly. Which is better than my Irish one that goes on roaming at .25/meg once I cross the border, but it's still not as good as it was.
Yes, but feel at home has predated this for years and also works outside the EU (US/AU/NZ). I don't think it's just that. Though Vodafone's new EU roaming offer is definitely just that.
Italy has a formally uncapped mobile Internet, but past a quota it should slow down to a crawl. I really don't know if it does or what the usual prices are because my data needs are very modest. I'm on a cheap offer from many years ago and I pay 6 Euro per month for 2 GB + some text and voice. I use between 300 to 400 MB of data per month, everything else is on WiFi (some GB) because basically there is WiFi everywhere I go unless I'm outside. Add some 50 Euro at home for fiber, but I need that to work (I just did some docker push/pull) so I'm not sure it compares with your 25 pounds for mobile (do you have fixed Internet?). Furthermore it's a 50% operating cost for my business, but same for the phone.
In the Netherlands you can buy "Unlimited Everything" plans for €35 a month. This means unlimited Calls, texts, data in the entire EU. I think the EU part is capped to 10gb a month after the first 2 months you spend outside NL.
In NL, it will stay unlimited the entire year. The prices some people posting here are paying are ridiculous.
And FYI: the EU mandates that you can use calls/texts/data from your own, local plan in the entire EU for up to 60 days every year. Without any additional costs. (finally)
> Prices were collected from the operator with the largest marketshare in the country, using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days.
The prices are definitely skewed higher because of these constraints. As other have pointed out more expensive plans often have a better currency/MB value than the cheapest plans.
T-Mobile in the US has a set of plans that offer unlimited international data roaming in more than 140 countries [1]. The catch? The bandwidth is capped to 128kbps.
I just got a bar graph full of $0.00 (http://imgur.com/uciLhOG). Maybe there's a bug in measuring images and fonts referenced by CSS? More decimal places are a good idea.
Yeah, it's a rounding thing. I'm guessing your site is so lightweight that the cost ends up being negligible. You should be able to click through from the result page to a fully detailed report from webpagetest.org.
There's a dilema of browsing with a web app(firefox, opera, chrome) and navigating using a native app when you are in development countries.
Using web browsing consumes your data pretty fast and the cap limits are low(~500mb), but it gives you good energy consumption. Using apps to navigate is more efficient with your data consumption; however, battey life drains pretty fast.
The latter is due many cheap or mid mobile phones; if you have a high end phone shouldn't be a problem.
I used to live in Peru, and worked in mobile geo localization services.
Yeah, it's not developers pushing video header backgrounds, ten analytics packages, and form designs that require 2mb of JS, CSS and images to achieve cross-browser. Designers, marketing/growth-hackers. Clients. Developers aren't blameless but we can only push back so much (usually very little—few trust us on design/ux, even when we're right)
No, developers are not creating slow and bloated sites. This is merely a side effect. They are optimizing for developer productivity without a care for the end user at all.
Similar situation in Germany. With Aldi Talk, you can get 1GB and 300 texts/minutes for 8€. When valuing the text/talk component at 0, that still works out to 2.18 cents USD per 2.5MB, an order of magnitude less than the claimed 20ct.
Note that they picked the cheapest plan with at least 500MB, not the one with best value. Furthermore the largest ISP may not be the one with the best plans at the low end of the spectrum. That skews the data enormously.
> I may be getting a better than average deal in Canada.
Pretty much.
Freedom Mobile has limited coverage and is still rolling out LTE to the coverage it has. You can't really use it as a counter-example when it's a no-go for many Canadians. The site seems pretty close to what you can get if you shop around (it's exactly what I pay for example).
CRTC continues to do a bang up job of protecting Canadians!
On the flip side, I lose coverage incredibly often with Freedom Mobile. Basements, but also random parts of ground-level buildings, are off-limits. To be fair, their coverage map doesn't flat out lie anymore, so they are improving.
Poland, Russia - these are not exactly cheap countries. What makes data services so inexpensive in those locales?
I know that in Russia the telcos were able to grab the spectrum at almost zero cost. Bad for the state budget, great for telco market cap, but looks like it's also good for consumers.
- Polish people are tech savvy and get easily excited about new tech, so there's high demand for data services
- there is a lot of competition. There are four major vendors, and there's already more than one mobile phone per citizen (and that's including infants). So the only way of acquiring new customers is to make them switch from other telecom.
- Poland is pretty small and have relatively high population density, so it's pretty easy to have good coverage.
- It is easy to avoid taxes (and even if you pay them, they are pretty low), so telecoms have a lot of spare cash to invest in the infrastructure :)
Makes sense but the driving factor has to clearly set Poland apart from the likes of Germany or South Korea which also have savvy consumers and rapid adoption.
In the U.S. there are multiple competing carries of meaningful scale but the data plans tend to be expensive.
Yeah,but in the US you have coverage problems with most of them. And in Poland, basically they all have great coverage. I've used two of the major carriers, didn't have coverage problems even in remote parts of the country. (HSPA+, but even LTE is getting pretty universal)
I think the $0.00 countries were just skipped (or missing from source data).
In Finland, using "the operator with the largest marketshare in the country, using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days" yields a 9.90€/month plan (Saunalahti Tarkka 1M) which has unlimited data (like most plans here).
But if it weren't for the single Google ad it would be reduced to more like 1% of normal page weight, which is more like my mental target for pages, ie 10s over dial-up...
PS. Yes, http://www.exnet.com/ from the days when I was providing dial-up in the UK, is ~20kB.
Pretty cool. Also nice to see that http://taoofmac.com is confirmed to weigh in at only 0.33MB - I do progressive image loads and strip everything I can precisely to cater to mobile users...
Japanese carriers have a very high base rate on all their "smartphone" plans that they justify by forcing you to get an unlimited calls plan. You can get a far better deal on data with the multitude of MVNOs; the majority of which are on the former telco monopoly, NTT docomo, since the telco regulator has more influence on them. You'll get drastically lower priority on the network though (in the tune of 2 MBit/s instead of 20 Mbit/s as soon as the network has any load)
I'm sceptical of these figures. How can the US rank higher than Botswana and Brazil in PPP adjusted dollars, when it ranks lower in unadjusted dollars and the cost of living is higher in the USA?
Can't view the site properly right now (I'm text-only), but is it possible to see how much your ads cost your users? I would looove it if businesses/developers cared about that.
