No matter how you felt about that monthly or quarterly rechargeof your mobile data pack, here is a revelation that will change your view onthat regular expense.
A report “Worldwide mobile data pricing: The cost of 1GB ofmobile data in 228 countries” by a UK-based company Cable has found that Indiais the number one, yes the top, in the cheapest mobile data in the entireworld. In India, one GB of mobile data costs $0.09. For comparison, the highestcost in the world is $52.50 per GB.
The report claims, “A country whose young population has aparticularly high technological awareness, India offers a vibrant smartphonemarket, with strong adoption and many competitors. Data, therefore, is quitestaggeringly cheap.”
The reasons for the low costs include large-sized data planswith allow for a lower per GB cost e.g. India and Italy. An additional reasonis the availability of multiple service providers and thus the market competition.
Most of the neighboring nations of India too are ranked nearthe top. Pakistan is no. 17, Bangladesh is No. 19, Nepal is no. 31, Sri Lankais no. 8, China is number 12, and Singapore is no. 95 in the cheapest mobile internetranking.
In the most expensive mobile data ranks, the region ofSub-Saharan Africa was dominant, as well as Caribbean and Oceania.
Dan Howdle, consumers telecom analyst at Cable.co.uk,comments that, “Many of the cheapest countries in which to buy mobile data fallroughly into one of two categories. Some have excellent mobile and fixedbroadband infrastructure and so providers are able to offer large amounts ofdata, which brings down the price per gigabyte. Others with less advancedbroadband networks are heavily reliant on mobile data and the economy dictatesthat prices must be low, as that’s what people can afford.”
For the most expensive ones, he comments, “At the moreexpensive end of the list, we have countries where often the infrastructureisn’t great but also where consumption is very small. People are often buyingdata packages of just a tens of megabytes at a time, making a gigabyte arelatively large and therefore expensive amount of data to buy. Many countriesin the middle of the list have good infrastructure and competitive mobile markets,and while their prices aren’t among the cheapest in the world they wouldn’tnecessarily be considered expensive by its consumers.”
Interestingly, the researchers found that the contemporaryworld is composed of four nation archetypes – excellent infrastructurecountries, heavily reliant on mobile internet countries, small data consumptioncountries, and wealthy economy countries.