A man is surprised by a video on his phone (photo by wayhomestudio / freepik)
The ever-increasing cost of living, with the wave of product and service price increases, has not yet affected us in the cellular sector – but even if it does, it’s always worth putting things in proportion. As we told you last week, Israel is the cheapest country in the world for mobile surfing according to a study carried out by the British telecommunications price comparison site Cable.co.uk, and even if the price goes up, it doesn’t look like we will even come close to the next country in line.
But there are countries that compared to the prices of mobile surfing in which even the next country in line, and any price increase that may or may not happen in Israel, looks like child’s play. Last week we mentioned the five most expensive, and this time we will expand on the top ten in this very disreputable index.
As we already mentioned in the previous article, in the first four places (or last, to be more precise) there are island countries, where it is very difficult to build infrastructure. Three of them are also on the list of the 10 countries with the smallest population in the world, so building the infrastructure there would not have been possible if the companies had not charged a high price. These countries are the island of Saint Helena, which is a little over a third of the way from Angola in Africa to Brazil in South America and occupies the first place, with a little more than 6,000 inhabitants who each pay an average of $41.06 for each gigabyte of surfing; The Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina, where only 3,700 residents are forced to pay an average of $38.45 per giga and are placed in second place; And Tokelau, an island located in what can be defined as the “backside of the globe”, south of Hawaii, a little after a third of the way from Australia to Mexico, with less than 1,400 inhabitants who pay about $17.88 per giga and are in fourth place.
In third place, between the Falkland Islands and the Tokelau Islands, are the islands of Sao Tome and Principe, which are a short flight away from the countries of the Gulf of Guinea in Africa. There, the reason for the high price is apparently less the size of the population – since it is about almost 230,000 people, a similar size to Mayotte (an island on the other side of Africa, on the way to Madagascar, which has about 270,000 inhabitants and a price of “only” 1.23 dollars per giga and is placed in the 95th place in the ranking of the cheapest countries to surf) – but the fact that this is a less developed region of the world.
Other countries where the reason for the high prices may be related to the size of the population compared to the ability to retire infrastructure include Botswana, a country in South Africa with only 2.6 million people on a vast area; Turkmenistan, which is between Iran and Afghanistan and has 6 million inhabitants scattered over a large area; Togo in West Africa, on the Gulf of Guinea, with a population of 8.7 million people; And Seychelles, which is also (relatively) close to Africa and has a population of only 100,000 people. Yemen is apparently an exception, with a population of 31 million people, and the reason for the price there may be the situation in the country, which makes it very difficult to build and maintain infrastructure.
More in-
And South Korea has more than 50 million people and is considered a technological powerhouse. It also regularly leads the surfing speed metrics. But on the other hand, it is one of the countries with the harshest topography in the world, so building an infrastructure there is a more complex operation than in other developed countries, which is probably where the expensive surfing price comes from. Alternatively, it is possible that the fact that the country serves as a “test laboratory” for any new cellular technology means that it suffers from a high installation cost of new technologies, before they become more available and cheaper and spread to less innovative countries.
Dan Howdle, consumer communications analyst at Cable.co.uk, also puts forward a similar theory: “At the most expensive end of the list we have countries where the infrastructure is often not good, but also (countries) where consumption is very small. People often buy bundles Browsing of only tens of megabytes, which makes a gigabyte a relatively large volume of information, and therefore also expensive to purchase.”
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