![]() But even countries with good established broadband infrastructure have so-called ‘not-spots’. Taiwan has the fastest broadband in the world, at a mean speed of 85 Mbps. At 0.7 Mbps, Mauritania also has one of the slowest broadband networks in the world. On package cost alone, Mauritania has the most expensive broadband in the world, at an average of $768.16 (a range of $307.26 to $1,368.72). This enormous cost includes building physical lines to the property, since few already exist in Mauritania. Note that this study was looking for the cheapest broadband packages on offer, ignoring whether or not these packages had a data cap, so provides a useful ballpark figure rather than the cost of data per se. ![]() What’s perhaps easier to comprehend is the average cost of a broadband package. For reference, the metric is $1.19 in the UK and $1.26 in the USA. A cost of $263 suggests a combination of extremely slow and extremely expensive broadband. It’s an interesting metric, and one that acknowledges that broadband speed is as important a factor as the data cap. This metric is a little difficult to comprehend, so here’s an example: if the average cost of broadband packages in a country is $22, and the average download speed offered by the packages is 10 Mbps, then the cost ‘per megabit per month’ would be $2.20. Meanwhile, a study of the cost of broadband in 2018 shows that a broadband connection in Niger costs $263 ‘per megabit per month’. This compares with less than 50% in Uzbekistan and less than 60% in Algeria, Ecuador, Nepal and Iraq. The USA ranks 40th in the world for mobile download speeds, at around 34 Mbps, and is at risk of falling further behind as the world moves towards 5G.Īs for mobile network connection type, 84.7% of user connections in the UK are on 4G, compared to 93% in the USA, and 97.5% in South Korea. South Korea has the fastest mobile download speed, averaging 52.4 Mbps, but Iraq has the slowest, averaging 1.6 Mbps download and 0.7 Mbps upload. The speed of mobile networks, too, varies considerably between countries. Perhaps surprisingly, users experience faster speeds over a mobile network than WiFi in at least 30 countries worldwide, including Australia and France. Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine follow at $0.27, $0.49 and $0.51 per GB respectively. On the other end of the scale, India is the cheapest place in the world for data, at an average cost of $0.26. For comparison, the same amount of data costs $6.66 in the UK, or $12.37 in the USA. A gigabyte of data in Greece will set you back $32.71 in Switzerland, $20.22. These countries generally have a combination of poor technical infrastructure and low adoption, meaning data is both costly to deliver and doesn’t have the economy of scale to drive costs down.ĭata is expensive in parts of Europe too. Zimbabwe is by no means a one-off. Equatorial Guinea, Saint Helena and the Falkland Islands are next in line, with 1 GB of data costing $65.83, $55.47 and $47.39 respectively. You can read the study methodology for more information. The enormous range in price is due to smaller amounts of data being very expensive, getting proportionally cheaper the bigger the data plan you commit to. Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms analyst at .ukĪ 2018 study by .uk found that Zimbabwe was the most expensive country in the world for mobile data, where 1 GB cost an average of $75.20, ranging from $12.50 to $138.46. People often buy data packages of just tens of megabytes at a time, making a gigabyte a relatively large and therefore expensive amount of data to buy. Failing that, we are usually able to connect to home or public WiFi networks that are on fast broadband connections and have effectively unlimited data.īut there are parts of the world where mobile data is prohibitively expensive, and where there is little or no broadband infrastructure. Many of us are lucky enough to be on mobile plans which allow several gigabytes of data transfer per month. This time, I browsed the web for a day on a 50 MB budget. Last time, I navigated the web for a day using Internet Explorer 8. I hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs. ![]() This article is part of a series in which I attempt to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. Chris Ashton puts himself in the shoes of someone on a tight data budget and offers practical tips for reducing our websites’ data footprint. Data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. ![]()
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