If you always felt that you were paying too much for your mobile phone, you are right! According to a new report from the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative (OTI), mobile users in the US and Canada tend to pay more for a mobile phone plan than anywhere else in the world. The report examined different cell phone plans in various countries and found that markets with more competition and more regulation had the lowest prices.
The different plans examined by the report included prepaid, unlimited and postpaid plans offered in 11 countries. The report said that mobile users in the US pay the most fee for an average cell phone plan. Mobile users in the US pay at least $59.99 for a complete package of voice, text and data while users in Canada pay US$67.50.
Interestingly growing economies such as India and Hong Kong came were the cheapest at $12.90 and $13.50 respectively. US, UK and Canada paid the highest voice minutes with an average of $0.18, $0.17, and $0.31 per minute respectively. India and Hong Kong came in with the lowest per-minute rates at only $0.01 per minute.
India recorded the lowest prices for text and data. Japan had a high cost of $9.40 per megabyte in postpaid data plan while Hong Kong coming in second with $0.10 per MB and the US coming in third with $0.08. India came out to $0.0004 per MB being the lowest.
Walmart had recently announced that it was going into the mobile subscriber business using T-Mobile’s network. Lets hope the prices are dirt cheap after that!
You can read more here.