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In Finland the average amount of data transferred per SIM card is 17.3GB/month
- vaccinator 6y agoI average 2gb because I restrict myself since the rates I get are outreageous here in the US... I use wifi whenever I can to limit mobile usage (which is of course not included in the 2gb figure).
- mmm_grayons 6y agoI typically use less than 300MB for the same reason. It's too pricey for my taste, so I just use only a little bit when necessary. Honestly, waiting for wifi isn't that bad and I can download most of my work in advance.
- unnouinceput 6y agoMeanwhile, checked just out of curiosity, I used 640 GB in past 30 days. That's just my PC. Then there is wife's laptop and cell & kids laptops & cells. I suspect my household "eats" every month 1 TB of data. Not that we care anyway.
- perryizgr8 6y ago> Meanwhile, checked just out of curiosity, I used 640 GB in past 30 days. That's just my PC. I am curious how you manage this? Are you torrenting 4k movies continuously?
- unnouinceput 6y agoYup, something like that.
- vaccinator 6y agoI was talking about mobile data... my PC uses cable and the limit per month is 1-TB before I get charged extra...
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoIs home internet common in Finland? Or does everything connect to the cellular network?
- notsuoh 6y agoI don’t know the answer to your question, but back when I had unlimited tethering with fast 4G, I would basically just have it on all the time to use my laptop on the go and treated it like home WiFi. So even though I would have home WiFi and be connected while at home, I would still rack up 10+GB of usage monthly. That is to say, I can imagine hitting 17GB could be common every month even with home WiFi depending on the culture of usage.
- Tufff 6y agoMy perception may be biased, but I'd say it's quite common to have 10/10 Mb/s connection included in the rent and many opt to upgrade it to 100/10 for 10-20 euros a month (roughly 12-24 usd)
- nakkijono 6y agoAlmost everyone I know from Finland has home broadband as well. Mostly due to home computers and less than ideal indoor cell service. There was some switch to 4G for home internet (with mifi/usb dongles) as well, mostly due to aggressive pricing some years back. It was a good alternative to ADSL and cheaper, but became congested once a lot of people started using it. Yet, fiber is much more ubiquitous these days and is much faster and cheaper than either of those.
- deanclatworthy 6y agoCell service is excellent throughout Finland. I’ve been in remote parts of Lapland and summer cottages and streamed f1 over 4g. Your mileage may vary but pretty much everywhere I get minimum 3G. Cellular is ubiquitous so unless you’re living in a bunker coverage will be excellent. I believe 100mbit is even a human right here? If you live in a city there’s probably fibre laid down. Anywhere outside unless your neighbourhood pay for the fibre to each home you’re going to have to get a cellular modem :)
- devxpy 6y ago> Over here, unlimited mobile data means unlimited mobile data. This. Although India has the cheapest data next to Finland, the ground reality is quite different. I tried using 4G as my primary internet connection after COVID, and I got frustrated by "hidden" limits and random throttling from the ISP - ended up getting a fiber line. The 4G modem was a complete waste of money.
- dheera 6y agoI really wish the US could institute some legal framework against deceptive advertising. Unlimited should mean unlimited, not throttled. If you are offering a 20GB plan, just say you are offering a 20GB plan. I've tried to use a 4G hotspot to setup my laptop and do work in outdoor parks but the number of times I can do that per month is limited.
- jiggawatts 6y agoThis kind of thing was forced upon Australian telcos, and it's great for consumers. For example, they can no longer advertise the "up to" speeds, they have to use the "typical evening speed", which is what's more relevant to the actual experience.
- voltagex_ 6y agoIt doesn't apply to LTE plans though - at least that I've seen. If you want an interesting test, find someone with a Telstra post-paid plan, and get a Boost Mobile SIM in another phone. Run speedtests side by side. Boost, although it's technically Telstra Pre-Paid, seems to be heavily throttled.
- xuki 6y agoI have a legacy Telstra plan that allows unlimited data, it's truly unlimited.
- fphhotchips 6y ago
- findthewords 6y agoAlso, no limits on tethering (hotspot wifi).
- econcon 6y agoFinland is a tiny developed country it probably has good fiber or coax penetration both of which offer better latency than 4g. So what gives? Its similar to my usage pattern, only time I use mobile internet is when I am out of WiFi range
- titanomachy 6y agoNot that tiny, same area as Germany but with 1/15th the population. Maybe fibre penetration isn't so good, I know Finnish telecom really sucked before the cell networks.
- rectang 6y ago> Finland is a tiny developed country Maybe you're thinking of Iceland (population 364,000) rather than Finland (population 5.5 million)?
- zokier 6y agoFor comparison Finland is almost exactly the same size as Colorado both in population (5.5M vs 5.7M) and area (338k km² vs 270k km²). In terms of population only Finland sits between NYC (pop 8M+) and LA (4M).
- yencabulator 6y agoBased on the NYC reference I assume you mean Los Angeles and not the state of Louisiana? The City of Los Angeles is kinda irrelevant to what's considered "Los Angeles", and the Greater Los Angeles area that most people would consider to be all part of "Los Angeles" the place they call home is just about 19M residents.
- topkeks 6y agoLOL! American education...
- culturestate 6y agoI moved recently and had to tether for ~a week while my ftth was being relocated - ended up using around 80GB of data in that time. Normally I use less than 6GB per month. I would be curious to see how different mobility patterns in different places (e.g. I live in Singapore, where commutes are naturally short) affect mobile data usage vs. other more obvious factors like home internet penetration. It feels like I use much more data when I'm back in the US or working on site, even if I have a fixed base to work at, just because of the amount of time I spend moving around.
- kace91 6y agoI've got unlimited mobile data for a great price in spain as well. Honestly, I hope the us catches up at some point because software still doesn't even consider it an option - I have to actively fight all my settings so I can get updates, backups, streaming at high quality and the like because the OS considers they should always be done on wifi. Sometimes, the situation has been so absurd that I've had to use the share Network function with a friend's phone to fool my phone into believing I'm on wifi so I could download an update.
- Waterluvian 6y agoI’m not throwing shade but I’m genuinely curious what the infrastructure cost per user is when comparing Europe and US and Canada. Surely it might be part of the problem.
- MrMorden 6y agoThe US does have higher labor costs than most of Europe, but lax regulation of special access service (backhaul) is probably more of a factor.
- kristopolous 6y agohuh? What's your source?
- rsynnott 6y agoProbably more down to limited competition in the US, honestly. Comparing costs across Western Europe, it’s hard to make the case that it’s an infrastructure cost problem; Germany (dense) is more expensive than Ireland (non-dense) which is more expensive than the UK (dense) which is more expensive than Finland (very non-dense).
- Waterluvian 6y agoThanks. Yeah that does sound plausible. Canada suffers from anticompetition too.
- tus88 6y agoAnd?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alex_young 6y agoI’d love to see Switzerland’s avg usage. For $30 a month true unlimited where you just don’t even think about data transfer. Speeds in the 100 MB/s range most of the time and people seem to just take it for granted.
- marc3842h 6y agoI'd like to know it as well. Considering Switzerland is generally an expensive country, we have very reasonable prices for mobile subscriptions, mostly due to the large competition in this area. I personally average on about ~12GB per month. I pay Fr. 37.50 per month for unlimited calls and sms in Switzerland and unlimited data in Switzerland & the EU.
- 082349872349872 6y agoGranted, I had to drive an hour then hike an hour more last time I experienced it, but even Swisscom's net has holes.
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoAs a regular video creator and consumer who tethers mobile data, I'm using about 100GB/month. My total mobile bill is 700 Taiwan dollars a month, which is about 25 USD.
- SRTP 6y agoI live in Singapore and estimate my monthly data usage is around 20 GB / mo. I pay about 15 USD/mo.
- CydeWeys 6y agoDo you stream a lot of video or something? I can't figure out how people reach these figures. I mainly use my phone for Web browsing, podcasts (mostly downloaded at home), and chatting, and never remotely get close to these figures.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _s 6y agoBeing fairly active on social media; especially GIF or video heavy websites will see you churn through 1-2gb a day easily.
- lucb1e 6y agoThere are also clients that can just download those gifs while you're on WiFi for later consumption. I'm not saying you should do this, just that it's also quite easy to save 90% of your data usage without reducing media consumption if you are so inclined.
- lucb1e 6y agoI never exceeded 1GB of mobile data, personal and work combined, literally ever. But I can totally understand how one reaches these figures without doing anything weird: video call meetings, video streaming while commuting or traveling, music streaming throughout the day, maybe also work via tethering when not in the office or at home... it's just that one can choose to not do these things. On the one hand, I feel like I'm preaching and practicing abstinence by doing things like downloading videos that I want to watch in the bus ahead of time over WiFi. On the other, long-range mobile data only works because we're not all using it at the same time, that's why we we meter it per month: it's a poor man's way of limiting concurrent usage while allowing bursty traffic and keeping the limits understandable to consumers. If you use a lot of data or need a lot of bandwidth reliably (e.g. IT company), running a local network yourself is the obvious way to go today. But with small cells coming to a bus stop near you, and seeing just how easy mobile data is compared to WiFi that can be out of range more easily (or you may be connected to a faraway access point), can be down and nobody is on call to fix it (in a company, someone might be on call for WiFi, but at home?), etc., it seems clear that for 98-99% of people and 90-95% of companies, using mobile data exclusively is the medium-term future (let's say around 2040). And if it is the future, and since I use anywhere between 50GB and 2TB per month in data on my home internet connection (not counting others in the house), mobile data will need to handle such figures per person as well. More, even, because it will be in the future. Someone having a 20GB+ mobile data plan is not exactly weird to me, even if with a little bit of foresight you can limit your usage to 1-2GB a month (and that still allows for quite a bit of video calling and occasional videos on the go) and save a bunch of money in 2020 (something on the order of subscribing to both netflix and spotify premium).
- csours 6y agoWill neighborhood 5G change up the internet availability landscape in the US? I pay $70 bucks a month for cable internet which is oversubscribed and sucks in the evening.
- z2 6y agoThat cost per GB chart is interesting--how can Portugal be 5x more expensive than Spain, or Japan be (what looks like) 30x more expensive than Korea? Are there hidden subsidies or costs driving this or is it from infrastructure, policy, or historical reasons?
- rsynnott 6y agoLack of competition, generally.
- torgian 6y agoI’m glad I live in taiwan now. Back in the states my internet sucked, both mobile and home. Now I use my phone as a mobile hotspot and do my work on it. I use about 30 or 40 gigs a month when I’m not at home.
- mortenjorck 6y agoThe left side of the chart is a surprising cohort, hardly the usual suspects when it comes to being behind the curve. There’s the US, sure, but it’s actually slightly ahead of Norway, and significantly ahead of both Canada and Japan! You have two Scandinavian countries on opposite ends of the spectrum, two east Asian countries on opposite ends, and even two countries with significantly large landmass (look at Russia only two spots short of Korea). What gives?
- NYCHomosapien 6y agoI can answer as a homegrown Canadian. Canada suffers from oligopolies in many industries, telecoms being one of the big ones. Before I moved away to the US I was grandfathered into a $80CAD 8Gig/month plan and that was actually considered VERY good compared to what was available. Now in the US I pay $50USD for unlimited and burn through 25 gigs a month.
- kalleboo 6y agoI don't know how the numbers on this chart are created, but in Japan, the largest mobile operator (the former government telco monopoly) charges €55/mo for a plan with 60 GB of data, which should put it much further to the right. It says "median plan cost" so I wonder what terrible under-specced plans they've dug up for the comparison. The Japanese government is concerned about the high prices and low competition and is currently in the process of having the legacy telco parent company (with 30% government ownership) re-acquiring the mobile operator. https://www.lightreading.com/5g/ntt-to-reacquire-docomo-for-hefty-$38b/d/d-id/764271 https://www.lightreading.com/5g/ntt-to-reacquire-docomo-for-...
- lopmotr 6y agoThat chart could mean just about anything. If a country has most of its plans with very generous data but expensive/limited talk, and vise versa, the data plans won't appear on the chart because they don't have 1000 minutes or might not affect the median because there might only be handful of them, even if they're the most popular. With only the notes shown, it's pretty much meaningless.
- Hamuko 6y ago
- alliao 6y agoNew Zealand reporting in here, the cheapest plan for unlimited mobile data is around 20 USD/month, but you need 4 people committed together to get such rate. A true independent unlimited mobile connection will set you back $45 USD or so with first 40GB at full speed. Realistically speaking the 20USD/month is already quite reasonable, if world as it was pre-COVID I might coerce some friends and family to join the plan with me. But I really would prefer 25 USD no strings attached.
- gok 6y agoSo judging by that graph, the median Finn pays way less than 1 euro per month for cell service?
- achempion 6y agoIn Russia I pay $2 for 100 min + 11GB of traffic which I never use (less than 1GB each month) because of WFH. It'll be around $3 for unlimited traffic though.
- jlokier 6y agoUK here. I pay £20/month (USD $26) for unlimited data, voice and SMS. I have two such SIMs, one for the home router (because it's cheaper and faster than FTTC) and another for my phone. Usage varies, but on a busy month the home SIM will see 100-300 GB, mostly for Netflix. The phone SIM sees about 10-30 GB. Speed varies by time of day, but at peak it's 90 Mbit/s down, 20 Mbit/s up. At the slowest times of day it drops to about 8 Mbit/s down. The phone is faster than the router, so I've occasionally switched to using the phone to download something large. Last time I checked, there was technically a cap on the monthly data of 3 TB. For a while they also limited tethering to 30 MB, i.e. using the phone as a wifi hotspot, and then (if they detected it) you could theoretically be charged a lot for tethered data over that cap. But they officially removed that restriction a few years ago. The links are a bit unreliable. But the FTTC connection I had before was more unreliable, and more than twice the price. The FTTC connection before that was nearly three times the price (gouging - it started out cheaper than quietly kept increasing a lot). And if I move home, I can take my link with me now, instead of being tied into a 12 month contract at a fixed location.
- blibble 6y agoas another data point: my FTTC was basically perfect, 110mbit sync, dropped maybe three times a year I was sort of sad to replace it with FTTP, which has been slightly more unreliable
- gorgoiler 6y agoWho are your providers, and did you have to negotiate these tariffs or do they come as standard offerings? Crucially: how long are you contractually tied to your cell provider?
- readams 6y agoI have some hope that Amazon and SpaceX will force prices to go down for at least home internet by bypassing the ISP monopolies. Might be a while though if ever. Google Fiber has sadly fizzled out because of the anticompetitive practices of the local monopolies.
- LurkerAtTheGate 6y agoI would maintain some hope for municipal fiber. Our local power company deployed one carefully, and was very successful despite repeated suits by the cable-internet provider. Eventually the ISP fought back at the state government level which limited the fiber's expansion, but lots of rural areas launched their own using similar models. Apparently the cable monopolies didn't feel it was worth competing for rural areas, meaning a number of farmhouses, hours away from cities, have better service for cheaper.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoStarlink won't be usable in urban areas.
- jdofaz 6y agoI'm on the T-Mobile Connect 2GB plan with unlimited talk and text. I was paying $50 a month for basically the same plan but thanks to one of the Sprint/T-Mobile merger conditions they have to offer it for $15 now. I don't like to watch video on my phone, I almost never hit the 2GB limit unless I try.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoSee, I just see that as wildly inefficient. Why do I need to stream videos on the go? If I listen to music, why wouldn't I have it locally? My usage is usually right around 1 GB a month, and I'm constantly on my phone, social media, browsing, etc.
- mackrevinack 6y agoyes especially with music, most of the time I'm listening to the same songs and only listen to new ones maybe 10 or 20% of the time
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoExactly! I'd rather buy a handful of new tracks a year at $1.29 each than pay for a Spotify subscription.
- blueblisters 6y agoWhat drives the high cellular prices in the United States? Is it regulation? Infrastructure cost? Lack of competition? I don't buy the lack of competition argument honestly. Cellular data is a commodity. Cell towers are not exactly a utility to the extent that optical fiber/coax is. If there was margin to be exploited, capital would have flowed in to take advantage. But it's likely that the risk adjusted return in the cellular business is already too low to attract more players and drive down costs without a significant technology moat.
- sfmike 6y agoIn Taiwan, pay about 1000TWD or 33 USD. for the 80mbs unlimited data 30 day plan(no contract). Never throttled always fast even when in far away tea mountains like Alishan. If I took contract its 700 or 23 usd/month. Unlimited meaning yes you could download 24/7 it won't cap.
- durnygbur 6y agoSweet. What percentage of this is ad and analytics networks? YouTube ads? Mobile apps love to binge on data.
- fierarul 6y agoIt's a good thing that with EU's "Roam Like at Home" people from Finland can go transfer those 17GB/month in any other EU country, but people from Romania saw the introduction of "national" SIM cards which leave you literally stranded (no signal) when crossing the border. Better roaming for me but not for thee.
- Hamuko 6y agoWe don't actually get unlimited EU data here. DNA offers 7–15 GB a month (unlimited in the Nordics and the Baltics), Elisa 13–30 GB a month (unlimited in the Nordics and the Baltics) and Telia 4–25 GB a month.
- fierarul 6y agoThis reminds me of the Homer Simpson quote: "We should exchange insurance information. I have none!" The average Romanian would cross the national border and notice the phone have NO signal. No data, no GBs, no voice, only 112. Truth be told we have only been in the EU for the past 13 years...
- nico42 6y agoI'm not sure we should see unlimited 4G plans as a positive. 4G consumes a lot more enregy than Wifi for the same bandwidth, so usage of Wifi should be encouraged when possible. (https://whatis5g.info/energy-consumption/ https://whatis5g.info/energy-consumption/)