Infographic – Mobile Internet Costs Worldwide

Click on image for full-size view (Statista)

9 Mar. 2019. We’ve reported at Science & Enterprise on many uses of smartphones and sensors, particularly for research, telemedicine, and — just this week — monitoring the state of vital infrastructure. But assumed in many of those applications is the ability to easily and inexpensively transmit the data collected by these devices over mobile internet services for collection and analysis. The links below give a few more recent examples.

And also this week, our friends at Statista provide an indication of the cost paid by consumers for transmitting those data over the mobile internet in many countries of the world, our infographic for this weekend. The findings for 15 of the 230 countries compiled by the British web site cable.co.uk, show mobile internet users in India and Russia pay the least out-of-pocket for their services, with prices for a gigabyte of data under $US 1.00. At the other end of the range, people in South Korea and Switzerland pay about $15.00 and $20.00 respectively for a gigabyte of mobile internet data. And off the chart — both literally and figuratively — is Zimbabwe, where mobile internet costs more than $75.00 to send or receive one gigabyte of data.

North American mobile internet consumers, in Canada and the U.S. pay about $12.00 per mobile gigabyte of data, at the higher end of the scale, while most of the rest of the world pays roughly between $2.00 to $10.00 for each gigabyte of data. A cable.co.uk analyst says the wide variation in prices reflects the state of each country’s fixed and mobile broadband infrastructures, as well as government policies that subsidize consumer internet services.

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