Watt-Hours and Gigabytes are fundamentally different units, so comparing the marginal cost of electricity and data is non-sensical. In terms of the fixed costs

Watt-Hours and Gigabytes are fundamentally different units, so comparing the marginal cost of electricity and data is non-sensical. In terms of the fixed costs. For electricity, the price you pay powering your phone is subsidized by the price you pay powering your HVAC. The portion of the electricity infrastructure that powers phones is negligable. In contrasts, the cellular networks exist almost entirely to run phones; so the cost phone users pay needs to be enough to maintain the entire network. To be a fair comparison, you would need to imagine a world where phones were the primary consumers of the electric grid. In such a world, I would expect to see electricity prices rise significantly