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).
