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Comment by harias | Hacker News Reader

For 6 dollars 50 cents, you get 1.5 GB/day for 91 days.

Data-plans on offer: https://www.jio.com/en-in/4g-plans

And they manage to remain profitable (only-telco in India that reported profit this quarter) : https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/relian...

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Holy crap, why am I paying $35/mo for 500mb? >.<

To counter-act this simply position yourself on the other end of American ridiculous data prices: buy $AMT, $SBAC. Those are cell tower REITs. They're up >900% and >2000% since the 2009 crisis.

They’re up because they’re leveraged to the hills.

Investing in them is a play on interest rates more than anything.

Lots of télécoms came out like bandits by selling their infrastructure at very high valuations.

I'd love to learn more on your opinion about these REITs.

Looking at the lastest financials report: https://s22.q4cdn.com/758587962/files/doc_financials/quarter...

They are reporting a leverage ratio of ~7. My initial hot-take: That's a leverage multiple; not a ratio. Yet reading their formula they are reporting that 7 as DEBT / PRE-DEPRECATION-PROFIT. Thus such a formula is not an LTV but rather a formula one might use if one acknowledged the underlying assets only had cashflow value.

Using an LTV formula they look more reasonable at 0.7LTV. Which indeed is high, about half the equity common to the REITs I've looked at. Yet with a 10% return on invested capital it does not seem the infrastructure was overvalued.

Now this is not an area I know much about so I'm mostly hoping you can show me where I'm wrong and thus I can learn more.

Honestly I have no idea how their financials look like, I'm simply playing trends (I've even bought into BYND and exited at some profit). But one thing I do know is that the stock prices of AMT and SBAC do not look particularly different in the times when rates were going up (Oct 2015 - Dec 2018 [1]). Of course such behaviour could be just long term market delusions, so trade with caution!

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TB3MS

My take was, any company like this that survived in 2009 did very well.

Many high debt companies that had their equity almost wiped out ended up with 10x the equity if they could pay their bills again.

Where are you?

In Poland I pay ~ 13.30 USD for 12 GB per month (with additional 12 GB on top of that for 1 year) + unlimited calls/sms/mms. And my plan is pretty crappy in comparison to currently available ones.

In the UK Three does a sim only plan that offers unlimited data (I've pulled down 100GB in a month before), tethering and use abroad (including the US) for £20 a month on a two year contract.

Crappy indeed. $7/mo for 15GB/mo is a current standard in Poland. I'm at 10GB/mo, $7/mo because I'm lazy recently and never used that much.

Belgium, here. I pay €20 for 4gbyte and unlimited call and SMS.

Median income in India is $1670.

That's per year, not month!

In the US, if you're not on prepaid, you're paying too much. T-mobile and Verizon have reasonably priced options in direct prepaid. Although, you won't get much cheaper than $35, you should have more high speed data for that, along with unmetered slower data.

Third party (or wholy owned subsidiaries) MVNOs are often less expensive as well.

I have 5 lines (3 actively used, 2 mostly dormant) active on Ting (an MVNO) and our total bill is usually $55-65/mo all-in (post-paid).

My $40 T-mobile postpaid plan has unlimited 4G/LTE data (non-throttled, but only 6GB can be used for tethering).

Greed.

All big companies are greedy (and typically are required by law). So that’s the one thing that isnt different.

I have a PS4, and before Jio, I purposely did not update my games (Witcher3 had a 20GB update). Even after getting a Jio connection, it was too time consuming. And then, I found out I have 3 10GB vouchers! And I usually get more, the more ads I consume.

EDIT: English sentence structure

Australia: 3 GB for 30 days $15 AUD or 15 GB for 1 year $99 AUD

https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans/data-packs/

The India data is per day..so for 90 days total bw is 1.5x90 GB

The per day limits get reset at midnight everyday, AFAIK. At least with some providers (or all?) there is no carryover of unused data day by day. It would be 1.5GBx90 only if the user uses 1.5GB every single day.

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