Indians are voracious consumers of content and healthy competition has reduced prices to absurdly low levels.
I'm in an urban area, with connection from one of the biggest providers. It costs me about 9 USD a month for unlimited data (I mean, about 2 GB a day, BUT, with carry forward, so I have about 250 GB of data to use in my account), unlimited calls and sms. I stopped worrying about data a long time ago.
And I don't even use JIO, the provider that brought in massive reductions in data prices.
Edit : I stopped using WiFi even at home, consume about 40 GB a month.
This sounds awesome. Good, affordable connectivity seems to be a basic human right. I wish it was this way everywhere. I'm in the US and can only get 1.5Mbit DSL, for which I pay 90 US dollars a month (with a basic home phone line). That's the only Internet I can get. East Coast USA.
You can not compare two currencies without including the parities. In terms of the US dollar, India has a Purchasing Power Parity of 21.276 as of 2019 [0].
> Purchasing power parities (PPPs) are the rates of currency conversion that try to equalise the purchasing power of different currencies, by eliminating the differences in price levels between countries. The basket of goods and services priced is a sample of all those that are part of final expenditures: final consumption of households and government, fixed capital formation, and net exports. This indicator is measured in terms of national currency per US dollar
It works best when comparing people with relatively similar consumption, e.g. asking about the material lives of engineers in east- vs. west-germany. Both had cars, radios, apartments with indoor plumbing, and awful haircuts, but they paid for them with different money. Any exchange rate was basically a fiction, but even if the currencies had been freely traded, these two still couldn't buy each other's goods.
Some people in India have lives similarly comparable to the west, e.g. the class who buy iphones. But the ones who make this super-cheap data interesting really don't. I mean there are riots when the price of onions doubles after a poor harvest. It's difficult to imagine a shared basket of goods which meaningfully captures the comparison here --- between prices experienced by those whose weekly budget can flattened by onions, and people in the US.
Probably a better comparison would simply be to quote daily wages alongside such prices. GDP is about US$5/day, compared to about $175/day in the US.
It's fine to take another normalisation metric - no metric is perfect. The point was that there is a normalisation needed. Far too often I see a comment which states, "Oh! It is just 1$ so cheap!". I chose PPP because it is meant for making parities. So, 9cents may or may not be cheap. We don't know until we use a normalisation factor.
People talk about dog-years too, but past some very crude level there's no avoiding knowing something about about the lives of dogs, or parrots, or goldfish. At which point it's less confusing to use ordinary earth-years for everyone.
First, PPP has its own issues [1] and is probably not the best way to compare the price of data.
Second, even after taking PPP into account data is still much cheaper in India - 30 USD per month for the thread parent after PPP conversion.
Math below:
PPP in [2] is National currency units/US dollar, i.e. INR/USD. It says that ~21.3 INR is going to buy you the same basket of goods in India that 1 USD buys you in USA.
Is this in a smaller rural town or a home very far out? Every metropolitan area I've seen at least has near-universal cable TV/internet coverage (typically up to 50-300 Mbps), and even exurbs these days often have fiber.
University town. I'm in the town limits, but on the very edge of town. Apartments downtown have fast connections, but edge neighborhoods and surrounding areas only have low speed options.
Same, some evenings at home, five screens playing HD video is quite common scenario. Tons of video calling etc. Just three four years back, I had to beg to a local ISP to install cable, agreeing to absurd charges. Things are moving fast in india. Whole progress of next decade can be attributed to Jio.
As someone who regularly consumes 1.2TB or more of data a month I really wish for uncapped affordable internet plans. Unfortunately I'm in the US and outside of a major city.
Eh, not necessarily. Both the simplest and most optimized pages I can think of are straight HTML with no Javascript. It takes work to add complexity starting from there!
Remember that devices are less powerful, and that outside the cities the connections still aren't universally that quick.
That said, many JAMstack providers are so wired into CDNs nowadays that actually serving the content closer to these users is just a baseline functionality of the webhost.
I’ve been on this site since 2009. Unfortunately the level of discourse has been in pretty steady decline over the last few years. Knee jerk responses and mindless downvoting are the norm here now.
For a site that’s ostensibly catering to engineers it’s a sad state of affairs. I can’t say I get much value out of it anymore.
Speech detection is just amazing when you think about illiterate folk, it's a game changer for them. Jio's genius was offering free data plans for a year, getting folks hooked. But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing.
> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing.
9cents in India would be equivalent to 1.91 USD after taking into account Purchasing Power Parity (OECD 2019). Therefore, you are in effect saying 1.91 USD per GB is amazing. You can not compare values without including purchasing power disparities.
It's messy right? I mean you aren't buying global data, you are buying data delivered in a particular town. Some of the costs of providing it are all about the location (e.g. renting land to put up towers) and some aren't at all (e.g. the networking hardware), so it still seems very impressive that they can do it this cheaply.
You can not simply compare a good in two different currencies without normalisation for disposable income, value and purchasing power. The value of 100$ in India is different than in the US. So obviously, some things in India will be cheap in $$$. You have to normalise on some metric. I chose PPP which is not perfect. If you do not like it, you can choose another reasonable one.
PPP makes no sense, I know economists use it all the time, but some goods are expensive and some are not across countries - food is cheap in India, there are massive subsidies around it. Anything imported is expensive - cars, electronics, foreign liquor. It's cheap and it's continuing to drop. And it's in no way $1.91 from an Indian perspective.
PPP makes no sense when it comes to comparing data usage between countries. Data is not based on same supply/demand characteristics as physical goods. It is quite literally arbitrary. Much like most software you buy/subscribe to. Ever bought a digital product at 90% discount during Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Why don't you find physical products with 90% discounts (unless it is a clearance sale)? Because you can't discount cost involved in acquiring raw materials and labour cost. Digital products on the other hand can be duplicated infinite times with zero additional cost. So is anything connected to it (which includes data, storage and processing). Sure there is some cost involved. But at scale that cost becomes negligible. You can't produce physical products at scale without the cost also scaling proportionally.
Even in India, before Jio made its entry, data was extremely expensive. Horrible speeds, very low data limits and no competitive pricing (you can say that it was a data cartel of sorts). Jio disrupted the entire sector. All ISPs reduced prices overnight. How could they do it? Wouldn't it hit their bottom line? Nope! They never went into loss in the first place. They charged exorbitant rates because they could. Not because there was some basis for it. That monopoly was disrupted. That is all there is to it.
And with a billion+ people in the country, ISPs will never go under loss for selling data for few cents - a dollar. Rather, they are probably making more than they ever did. Jio showed them the way to price correctly.
> PPP makes no sense when it comes to comparing data usage between countries.
We are not comparing data usage, we are comparing the value of two different currencies. The value of 100 US$ in India is different from that in the US or the EU. In order to normalise the value between two currencies, PPP is used. It doesn't matter what the 100US$ is spent on, data or food.
> We are not comparing data usage, we are comparing the value of two different currencies. The value of 100 US$ in India is different from that in the US or the EU. In order to normalise the value between two currencies, PPP is used. It doesn't matter what the 100US$ is spent on, data or food.
But you are comparing value of currencies by comparing two equal goods. That would mean also comparing acquisition of raw materials, labour costs, import/export of goods, availability of resources etc which is never going to be the same. PPP itself has shortcomings (you can read them here: https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/international-trade/15-cr...).
For example, India might have abundance of rice while USA might have shortage of rice. But rice is used for making noodles in both countries and demand for rice is equivalent in both countries. Would you price it according to PPP index? Nope. You take into account any tariffs imposed by host country. What about transport? What about labour costs? There are so many variables that can influence the pricing of a product. PPP is a bad way to judge cost of living and cost of goods/services.
If PPP is 21.3 (2019 data) between USA and India, a Harley Davidson in India should be 21.3 times cheaper than a Harley Davidson in USA. It isn't. The cost is pretty much the same. So is the case with iPhones. Even if iPhones are manufactured in India it would still cost slightly less than in USA. It will never be 21.3 times cheaper.
Also, let us take Big Mac Index into account. It was a humorous take on PPP devised by economists to compare the costs of a Big Mac between countries (as McDonalds maintained standards between countries). Now the cost of a Big Mac in India and a Big Mac in US might not reflect the true PPP of the country because it all depends on the appetite of Indians for a Big Mac. We are avid consumers of street food. Street food for us is what is McDonalds for Americans. Now how can you make McDonalds as a standard for the World when in my part of the World a tiny percentage of the population visits McDonalds to consume their delicious burgers while a large percentage eats street food? Wouldn't that obviously influence the price of a McDonalds burger in India as the demand for it is next to non-existent? Now let me reverse the case and say that India tomorrow undergoes a massive cultural change and everyone shifts from eating street food to eating at a McDonalds burger joint. What would the price of a Big Mac in India be then? Obviously with high demand the cost falls rapidly. PPP should blow up right? But does that truly reflect the standard of living between two countries? That is a food for thought for you.
> If PPP is 21.3 (2019 data) between USA and India, a Harley Davidson in India should be 21.3 times cheaper than a Harley Davidson in USA. It isn't. The cost is pretty much the same. So is the case with iPhones. Even if iPhones are manufactured in India it would still cost slightly less than in USA. It will never be 21.3 times cheaper.
PPP does not mean that Harley Davidson in India would be 21.3 times cheaper. It means that the value of Harley Davidson in India in US$ would be equivalent in the US when the price is 21.3x
If you do not like PPP, you can use another metric to normalise prices. But, you can not simply compare two goods in two different currencies by taking an exchange rate. You need a normalisation factor. Every metric has its shortcoming - pick one but don't compare absolutes.
> It means that the value of Harley Davidson in India in US$ would be equivalent in the US when the price is 21.3x
You lost me here. Can you elaborate on this more please? When it came to data comparisons you literally did multiply 21.3 with 9 cents and arrived at the value of 1.91$ per GB. So how is your comparing data costs using PPP as a normalizing factor fine but not fine when it comes to me comparing cost of manufacturing an iPhone or a Harley Davidson in both countries? Your argument isn't consistent. How can you ignore exchange rate and only look at PPP and decide the cost of living? It just doesn't make sense to me. Sure PPP gives a rough idea about where countries stand relative to the US when it comes to purchasing power parity but, more often than not, it is too far off from ground reality.
Let me once again repeat what I have said and please take some time to listen and understand it
* You can not compare goods across two countries by simply taking the exchange rate, you need to normalise to account for different factors like disposable income
* I took PPP as the normalisation metric. It is not perfect but is meant for this purpose.
* If you are not happy with PPP as a normalisation metric, you can choose another one as defined by economists. If you want to come up with your own, you are also free to take another metric and agree with economists to use them. The metrics you have suggested are already considered in the PPP calculations. Look into them
Key Point : You can NOT compare good(s) across two different countries/currencies in absolute values.
> * You can not compare goods across two countries by simply taking the exchange rate, you need to normalise to account for different factors like disposable income
This is where you are wrong. You have to take exchange rate when calculating PPP. Which is what I have been trying to explain to you. You are completely skipping exchange rate, which is why you are getting an inflated figure of 1.91$ per GB.
You should be calculating it this way:
Exchange rate: 73.17 INR = 1 USD
Now 9 cents is, 0.09 USD = 0.09 * 73.17 = 6.58 INR.
Since PPP is 21.3,
6.58 INR would be 6.58 / 21.3 = 0.3 USD
So 9 cents in India is equal to 30 cents in USA. Now, that is 30 cents per GB and not 1.91$ per GB.
> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing.
It has now reduced to 4 cents per GB for Jio Fiber. I'm sure local ISPs have reduced prices even more just to compete with Jio (in some places you can get 3.3TB for 10$)
At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow or customer issues cause obviously the budget for all that is not required because how can it even exist?
It's following the now classic Facebook model of pointing at scale achieved and outsourcing all the issues that scale produces to someone else namely govts, parents, teachers, the healthcare system, the police etc etc and then blaming all of those idiots for not being hip enough to handle it.
After all the networking are empowering women at 4c/GB.
We are nearing 20 years of this false narrative of the magic of "free" scale/magic companies with 10k employees handling a billion customers.
Given all the issues that have accumulated, keep track of how many more years its going to take for the chimp brain to figure out it was never possible.
Service issues do occur but ISPs are getting better at uptime because of the competition. A bigger issue is network saturation, especially for 4G networks. With fiber, on the other hand, some ISPs are offering upto 10-15% more than the quoted bandwidth just because there's plenty of spare capacity. Not sure if that will be the case in a few years.
> What’s the connection between weather and fiber?
Exposed cables (and there are some, at least in US—my installer had to run some last-mile cables from the nearest, uh, tower, I guess, to my house) suffer from poor weather.
I have AT&T Fiber – the installer ran a line from the nearest fiber hut to my home (across several neighbors' yards and a storm water runoff/drainage area), and left it exposed. But a separate truck rolled through about a week later and microtrenched it, so it's buried all the way up to my house.
Oh interesting. I was curious and found [1], which mentions aerial deployment is actually preferred when poles are available.
Around me, you might see aerial to neighborhood cabinets, but everything past that (cabinet -> pedestal, pedestal -> premise) is always buried. Considering how much of a pain buried lines are around here, I had presumed that there was some value to this. But looks like it might just be a constraint imposed by local regulations.
> At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow or customer issues cause obviously the budget for all that is not required because how can it even exist?
There is no such issue that ISPs are unable to solve with the infrastructure they have deployed at least for now. Keep in mind that what I am saying is anecdotal but I have a strong feeling it is the same for most Indians. In fact it was worse off earlier when they charged exorbitant rates but failed to deliver proper connectivity. Now things have improved multi-fold! Connectivity issues are now only evident when you travel to remote areas of the country. Earlier we had connectivity issues in the City/Town limits.
You are forgetting that it is at a scale of multiple hundreds of millions and potentially billions of customers that these ISPs are charging cents from. Every single day. That with value added services, which they charge extra, would mean they make a fortune!
Cost of labour is cheap in India. Land area being small is an added bonus as that would mean lesser cable laying work and lesser infrastructure. And since we skipped a generation of DSL/ADSL lines and jumped straight into 4G and Fiber we won't be facing much of the same issues that first World countries are facing today. Fixing network issues would be easier than say USA (you can fit 3 Indias (3.287 million square kms) in one USA (9.834 million square kms)).
India's female labor participation rate is 20%. In China, it's 60%. Smartphones can help bridge that gap a bit but real progress will probably come from creating safe, well-paying jobs.
Seems unlikely this 20% number implies that 80% of women are sitting at home drinking tea & looking after kids.
Where is it from? Is this formal sector employment?
IIRC the informal labor market is something like 80% of the country in total. Lots of people work in ways that are difficult to gather statistics about.
Yes I exaggerate slightly. But I wonder a lot about the quality of this data. Doesn't about half the country still work on farms? Low-tech farming has endless labor for all kinds of hands, but little paperwork.
I'm from an upper middle-class family in India and the data from all my relatives (including distant ones) matches this - 80% does seem about right for housewives. Similar for my friends.
It's changing rapidly with the newer generation but for my parents' generation that is definitely the norm.
Yeah, but it's a serious waste of their abilities as humans. It's no surprise that dual-professional households there who hire specialists for the cooking and looking after the house parts have better lives (as judged by the fact that few women who are professionals will want to become housewives while the opposite is a common desire).
Because there are rapid diminishing returns with every extra hour past the first few. My parents put a lot of work into me, but they were also full-time surgeons. My mum most definitely put a hell of a lot of work into me but she didn't spend all the time at home.
Worked out pretty well.
Of course you want to allow for people to do whatever they want, but part of that is enabling them to not have to be stay-at-home parents. And most people want to do something more than that, in practice, because creating things is a fundamental human need that most people have. If people want to be stay-at-home parents and they can do it, more power to them, but it's important to allow them to make that choice otherwise unconstrainedly and not through societal pressure to keep women at home because jobs are unsafe (there are whole categories of work one avoids at the margin in India if one is a woman, because you cannot guarantee safe transport from/to one's place of work).
It's not rewarding when those kids are the reason you are extremely poor. Population growth requires ever increasing productivity to maintain the same standard of living or people must sacrifice their standard of living until they die from preventable diseases or starvation.
Forcing people to have less children is bad (see one child policy). If people want to have less children voluntarily then you've found a way to success.
It's more than that. I know many women who quit their well-paying jobs because societally in the US we have not fully socialized child rearing in a way that China has.
e.g.: Our infrastructure and attitudes about kids transport is in dire need of refactoring.
Plenty of families would benefit from dividing labor that way; the biggest (non-artificial) obstacle is probably the inertia from the realities of giving birth and breastfeeding.
Seems related to the famous paradox that women in 'freer' countries choose _more_ gender-specific jobs. I think there's a natural explanation that relates to Maslow's Pyramid but anyway, just wanted to mention that if you haven't heard it.
Why unexpected? The Soviet Union did too. A few reasons for that (for the Soviet Union; I know less about China):
1) One of the premises of communism is equality of all people, including equality of men and women. As a result, a bunch of official barriers to women's labor force participation that existed in the US up until recently were removed quite a bit earlier in communist countries. Not only that, but the right to a job was considered a basic human right in the Soviet constitution, and not having a job was a crime punishable by jail time starting in the early 60s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)#So... for some basic details). Note that this did not necessarily affect societal attitudes about household labor, by the way: women were just expected to both work _and_ do the cleaning/washing/cooking at home...
2) Female employment in the US surged during WWII to make up for all the men drafted into the military, then dropped as the size of the military was reduced in the aftermath. Something similar happened in the Soviet Union with women stepping into "men's jobs", but without as much of a corresponding drop after the war. Something to do with the fact that US deaths in WWII (combat and non-combat) were ~400k, which was about .6% of the male population in 1941, on the assumption that most of those deaths were males and males were half the total population. For the Soviet Union estimates for military deaths (mostly male) in WWII vary from ~8 million to ~14 million (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the... ), which corresponds to 4-7% of the 1941 total population. 8-14% of the male population if the pre-war breakdown between male and female was 50-50, which may or may not have been the case. Plus whatever the breakdown was among the ~10-15 million nonmilitary deaths in WWII in the USSR... But the upshot was that there were a lot more women alive than men after the war, which reduced he "men coming home and taking back their jobs" effect, because the men just did not come home.
Labor participation would be 99% in all countries. What’s your point?
The 20% to 60% is meant to demonstrate female inequality in India, because most of them are working at home for zero pay and low social status. Whereas in more developed countries, women get paid to work in industries.
I think the point the parent is trying to make is that saying that "participation of women in the workplace" isn't a directly-correlated metric for the "how happy / empowered / established / productive are women in this society" metric that we all care about improving.
To put it another way, if we just take the former metric as the gold measure it is better to be payed to care for someone else's children than to not be payed to care for your own.
More than the statistics, it's the stories that open your imagination to the unlock connectivity is bringing. Using WhatsApp to report timber theft is something I would never have guessed.
This is something I found amazing about WeChat as well. You can schedule appointments with barbers, doctors, physicians, etc all through custom interfaces implemented by 3rd party vendors within the app. It's kind of like its own operating system. And for all of the needs that aren't already covered, you can always resort to basic text messaging (again through WeChat). This probably covers 100% of business communications: customers talking to vendors, vendors talking to customers, and vendors talking to other vendors. The only thing missing as far as I know is a way to communicate with government entities to e.g. file paperwork and such. But I'm sure that will come in time.
More than the abstract notion of it being a communication platform, it's the specific usecases that open your imagination to the unlocks connectivity is bringing. Using WhatsApp to report timber theft is something I would never have guessed.
I thought you'd have guessed the spirit of the comment since you're so adept at guessing.
It all seems ridiculous myth making, considering what indians have shared here on HN about how much asymmetrical power indian women have available through the court system in India, and the sort of abuses they inflict regularly, the misuse of the assymetry for material gain etc.
But yeah I get it. It's the new Democracy + Capitalism freedom making program they NEED to go through for their own good.
Restricting to people age 25+, Indian men average 8.7 years of education, and Indian women average 5.4 [1]. Add in the sclerotic nature of Indian courts, and unless I'm really misreading this data, it's hard for me to imagine that Indian women averaging an elementary school education are en masse closing this gap through legal maneuvers.
Maybe you're referring to a specific subgroup of women?
Hah this article. Was this even wikipedia? So it concludes that we need to take down the Patriarchy and the Sexism in India.
So I was right. We need to intervene in their society, and change it to liberate their women. Because we know best. And whoever doesn't align with that, must be supportive of violence against women. Shame on them too.
Parent said nothing about only men being interested in controlling women. On the contrary, liberation of women can be liberation from mothers, mother in-laws, grandmothers...
Ah. I just crossed 500 days of ban on high speed mobile internet. So much for cheap data and fundamental right. I think indian supreme court even decided against declaring intenet as a fundamental right because the same wasnt in the constitution. Smh.
> Ravi Agarwal, author of the 2018 book India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World's Largest Democracy says that for many Indians, the smartphone is their first private TV screen, personal music player, computer, and camera. Agarwal compares it to the experience of owning a car for the first time—autonomy, privacy, and mobility.
Exactly right! This is what is truly liberating to the underprivileged.
more expensive inputs to construct and maintain cell networks in the USA. If you look at Indian telcos and US telcos, they have similar profit margins.
I think it's moreso that you can't get blood out of a stone (people wouldn't buy it over there if it cost more) and the true cost of mobile data distributed over all customers is close to $0.
Women in India need liberation. I talked with many married women who feel trapped in marriage but have no way out because they won't find a good enough job for them. They need to be shown power of feminism.
Indians are voracious consumers of content and healthy competition has reduced prices to absurdly low levels.
I'm in an urban area, with connection from one of the biggest providers. It costs me about 9 USD a month for unlimited data (I mean, about 2 GB a day, BUT, with carry forward, so I have about 250 GB of data to use in my account), unlimited calls and sms. I stopped worrying about data a long time ago.
And I don't even use JIO, the provider that brought in massive reductions in data prices.
Edit : I stopped using WiFi even at home, consume about 40 GB a month.