Comment by cldellow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cldellow | Hacker News Reader

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Man, as a Canadian, I hate being put in the position of defending our wireless monopolies. But here goes.

That website seems... not great?

I think you got a 50x ratio by dividing the average prices of $0.12 (Italy) and $5.94 (Canada).

That appears to be a median...but I'd like to know how they chose the plans they used for the calculation. For example, Canada's maximum price is given as $46.02/GB. Perhaps such a plan is technically available, but I really doubt someone is using it for data, so it seems bizarre to include it in this data set.

For cheapest prices, they cite $0.05/GB for Italy and $1.66/GB for Canada. But off the top of my head, Rogers, which is the #1 telco in Canada, offers $0.74/GB. Seems... odd that it didn't make it into this dataset.

(And hey, I would like to know where I can pay $0.05 to get a GB/data in Italy. Full speed? On a good network?)

I pay $29/mo for unlimited data in Canada. Granted - with caveats! It gets throttled after the first 6 GB. I wonder if this would be counted as $4.83/GB in this survey? Their methodology PDF is unclear.

Fair enough, I reckoned the methodology on the website probably wasn't the best, and $/GB is a pretty bad metric to begin with.

I meant it mostly as an example of how there can be an order of magnitude of difference between prices, or at least half an order. I do concede my 50x number is probably very inaccurate in practice.

My family's plan is 80$/month for unlimited data for 6 devices, throttled after something like 60GB between all of them. Unused data can be used on the next month. Not once have I worried about reaching any limits, even with frequent Netflix and YouTube on the go and panic downloading Spotify albums before getting on a flight.

I'll pitch in my celluar plan for comparison (Taipei)

Currently I'm paying around US$16/mo for unlimited LTE data with a major celluar provider here, and have been doing so for the past 4-5 years. (no, not unlimited with throttled cap, and with hotspot included)

And with recent 5G plans, unlimited plans (with 50GBs of unthrottled hotspot) can be had for effectively less than $30 a month, or even lower if you consider rebates for buying a phone on contract with them.

North American's celluar plans just seem so expensive.

Oh, yeah, NA's plans are expensive, no argument there. Just not 50x more expensive.

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