Hacker News Reader

Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, Data is cheap and smartphones are plenty.

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.

View on HN

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

[0] https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...

I'm not sure PPP is a great measure here.

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.

"It is better to be vaguely right and than precisely wrong".

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.

9 USD = 9 * 70.394 = ~633.5 INR [3]

633.5 INR = 633.5 / 21.3 = ~30 USD PPP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity#Issues

[2] https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...

[3] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/year...

> 9 USD = 9 * 70.394 = ~633.5 INR [3]

> 633.5 INR = 633.5 / 21.3 = ~30 USD PPP.

Thanks for taking the time to correct me.

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.

If you are in range of cell towers, there is likely a 4g lye mvno offering decent speed internet.

I used https://www.ubifi.net/ for a year until I got fiber and was quite pleased with it. (No affiliation, i just gad a good experience).

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.

That's really awesome. I am next door and providers here boas of having lowest broadband fares in the region.

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.

Sounds like it's time to revise some of the advice web developers get about optimizating page sizes for developing markets.

As if web developers need a reason to make their websites slower.

NO!

Letting yourself go just because you have access to bigger clothes isn't healthy.

Revise, not throw out entirely.

Optimization always adds complexity. Don't do it more than necessary.

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!

YES! In that, I fully agree.

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.

While speeds are good and connectivity is cheap, the caveat is availability.

Not all areas have good coverage.

And also, lower page sizes save energy and reduce carbon emissions.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com