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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>Also, apparently the average monthly data usage for a mobile plan in Finland is 34.3 GB

Do the fins constantly watch Youtube or Netflix on their phone? 35GB on Mobile is quite lot. And that is an average number. Or do they basically use the Mobile Network as the Internet and dont use WiFi at home?

The same for Taiwan, 20GB on average. Once you take into account the lower end of the spectrum using sub 1GB per month, the median number would be huge.

Hong Kong Currently uses ~3GB on average per connection. With Unlimited plans at about $40 USD.

Those difference are mind-boggling.

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A Finn here. I regularly use more than 300 GB of mobile data per month. I pay 35 eur/month for unlimited data, including three SIM cards (Saunalahti MultiSIM). Makes roughly 10 cents per gig.

Brit, <2GB/month. How do you get to 300GB?

Easily. 4G is our household’s only connection, no other options in countryside. 3 kids + Netflix, etc. One SIM card is our Wi-Fi network’s gateway, another I put on my Tesla. One in my phone.

I think there are plenty of people who don't have a fixed Internet connection and just have a 4G base station at their home. I know that at least my grandparents and my dad have both gone that route.

Yes I understand that but that is the same in many places as well. People who cant get Cable / fibre and are stuck with DSL / 4-8Mbps connection decide to use 4G as their Internet. ( I used to do that in my apartment ) Those numbers would need to be a large enough percentage to have a signification effect on the total average.

There were 9.26 million mobile plans in Finland in 2019 (against a population of 5.5 million), and of those 70% had both calls and data features, 7% only calls and 23% only data. So if those 23% data-only plans are the home connections, that'd be roughly two million home connections.

Of course, it's probably not that clear cut. There are probably people who have a fixed line and then just have a mobile 4G hotspot when they go to the cabin. Impossible to tell really.

Data from https://www.ficom.fi/ict-ala/tilastot/matkapuhelinliittym%C3...

I guess a significant share of those data only plans are used in different kinds of m2m and iot devices.

Of course, the availability of unlimited subscriptions surely is a big factor in popularity of home use of mobile connections in Finland. In places where mobile typically has a data quota, people probably are less likely to use a mobile connection instead of DSL.

The source says that M2M plans are not counted in the total number of plans.

The only Data I find from BBC [1] , knowing the Finland is one of the best connected country from other source, along with Wiki [2] having 1.8M of Fixed-broadband subscriptions. I think 23% plans are home connection would be a gross over estimate.

But then we have comment above with 300GB of Mobile Data per month. I just checked my router log, I was barely doing 300GB per month, inclusive of all the iCloud Backup, Youtube, etc.... 300GB Mobile Data is absolutely insane.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/10461048

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

Can't speak for everyone, but since pretty much everyone seems to have unlimited data and the speeds aren't that bad the consumer behavior probably doesn't change at all if you're on wifi or not.

That said, 35GB average still seems rather high. I'm interested how much I'm using, but I only have usage data from the past four months and those months aren't really that representative of what I would call normal use.

According to my iPhone, I've used 7.7 GB since last December. Of course, I've been spending more time at home than usual, but even without a global pandemic, I'm mostly at home or at work, both where I have Wi-Fi and fixed Gigabit connectivity.

I'm definitely not the biggest consumer of data but at least I don't have to change my browsing behavior at all whether or not I'm on Wi-Fi or not. There's also the luxury that whenever I'm out with my laptop, I just tether instead of trying to figure out how to connect to the local Wi-Fi.

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