As an extension to this comment, other costs that could impact the delivery price of 1GB of total usage:

- speed

- overall saturation of tower (# users per tower)

- population density (full coverage of an area may be difficult)

- technology; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_sta... which could affect federal regulatory licensing costs, technology licensing and acquisition costs and competitiveness of market to provide technology, tower density, total user capacity

This is my laymen's interpretation. For instance, to blanket the US (9.834 million km² and 36 people per Km2) in LTE would be a significantly harder challenge then blanketing Myanmar (676,575 km² and 83 people per Km2) or even Norway (385,203 km² and 15 people per Km2).

Just look at the stats for Myanmar, 86 people per Km2, and I might be able to get most of them within 300-500k km2. My subscriber base is excellent!

Can you point to a source that says labour costs are the reason for high Telco prices? The ongoing maintainence of a tower seems like it would be fractional to operational cost.

Of course towers are a fraction of operating expenses. It was just an example of one piece of the puzzle. All labor costs in Myanmar are far lower, from marketing to lawyers to retail store staff.

And as I said, there are other reasons such as consumer surplus (rich people can pay more, so they do).

> And obviously providers will charge more if they can, less if they have to.

When prices are based on ability-to-pay rather than cost of provision, then that means there's a competition problem.

While Norway may have more expensive labour, I'm sure they farm out as much as they can offshore.

I wonder if Ericsson or Nokia charge lower prices for the same equipment in poorer countries.

And cost of land and permitting