Now, after my trip, I went to India. I paid $10 for 1.5GB of data DAILY from Airtel (India's top provider) which also includes free unlimited calls. The experience isn't uniform (India is quite huge in comparison to Singapore) but within any tier A city, Airtel is MUCH better than Singtel. Also, the customer support is top notch for the peanuts you pay them and you can find an operator to talk to in usually a minute or less. For comparison, in Singtel, you would have to navigate the crazyily designed IVR and wait for atleast 5+ minutes before you can talk to a real person.

I'm just citing this example to prove that the most expensive 1GB isn't necessarily the best.

Singtel (the most expensive telco) has multiple plans for visitors (100GB for $12 + 500mins talk + 1GB roaming + $3 to spend on public transport). If you want prepaid month to month, it's still nowhere in the stratosphere of $10/GB.

Also 4G coverage is virtually 100%, buildings and Faraday cages aside. (source: living in Singapore for 10 years, through 3G to 4G migration)

This is from Singtel Hi menu:

https://i.imgur.com/z6WmqYx.png

Notice it says "Data plans" - They give you only data and claim to give you free incoming only for 20 days as a bonus. That's not even a bonus, in India, you pay nothing for incoming, at least on the Airtel plan I mentioned.

Also, about your point on being expensive - Singtel is the only Telco that doesn't suck in terms of network coverage in the country. Starhub is a close second, with slightly cheaper plans depending on what you're after and M1 is garbage and everyone knows that.

I suggest you try 4G somewhere near Toa Payoh, Bishan, Bedok or even some places within Paya Lebar.

Not sure why you had to be so rude (5 minutes of research?) and created a new account just to contest this..oh well.

I’m with Singtel and don’t have any problems in those places. I even had 4G on Pulau Ubin today. Singtel has a $25/20GB plan for locals, $10/1GB isn’t really representative of typical plans.

My criteria isn't just having 4G, but able to actually use it in decent speeds. This is where Singtel sucks for me - the 4G logo will show on your phone, but pages will never load due to poor connectivity, even with 5 bars. I had this issue across three phones - iPhone, Sony and Samsung.

Singtel ALSO seems to do lot of throttling on videos depending on where in the city you're as well.

One of the nice things was that each telco would keep changing their plans to be better and better so it paid to pay attention and change plans whenever a better one came along.

As other posts have pointed out, $10/GB is not right (tourist plan or not). If you lived here long enough to know what the rates are, why misrepresent it?

All for having an IP address originating from such regions with cheap internet that you can't do much with anyway.

However, I can definitely say that I have had to solve a lot of captchas and can recall at least one incident where I could only have been banned because I was from Pakistan.

It's people misbehaving that causes these types of ban and who are voting for pro-censorship government. They could remove these restrictions overnight if they wanted to.

You can thank bad actors for that arrangement.

1Gb of internet in Australia ($0.68) is fantastic value compared to 1Gb of internet in Canada ($12.55). Australia's mobile data network is competitive on quality, and is amongst the fastest in the world.

I travel a lot, internet experience varies wildly especially in locations where restrictions are in place. For example typing this on a phone in a coffee shop in China, VPNd as for some non-reason HackerNews is blocked.

MBps has with it a lot of nuance, and then infra.

I lived in Canada for about ten years. It's a ridiculously expensive place in terms of food and internet costs. At the time I was pleased because the best connections we had in India were 1Mbps. When I moved back I was happy to see we had way better internet, digital payments and banking services.

Really? That hasn’t been my experience — and granted I’ve never lived in Australia or spent much time out of Sydney but I was there for 10 days in February and even though I paid for 4G Plus or whatever Optus calls LTE, speeds weren’t even comparable to what I can get in the US and were truly behind what I got in Seoul (where I was right after I was in Sydney). The only research I’ve seen that indicates Australia is amongst the fastest comes from research that is based on maximum speeds, not average speeds.

I can appreciate that Australia has robust cellular networks (assuming the user doesn’t live somewhere where they are forced to use satellite), in part because home internet speeds are so poor, but I wouldn’t put it in even the top 10 of parts of the world I’ve visited for internet speeds.

Optus is terrible. It's worth paying a slight premium for Telstra 4G. I'm on a 45gb cell phone plan for AUD$60 and it works everywhere, even in tunnels or remote areas, with speeds that shame my Fibre To The Building connection (though not in latency). My work laptop uses Optus and regularly loses connection despite being in an inner city suburb and close to a cell tower.

All the other brands you see are MVNOs running on mostly Optus and Vodafone, with the occasional one here or there on Telstra.

On a tangent related to that, though, I am very confused about exactly how Australia ended up with such a robust, competitive market when it comes to Internet services.

Importantly, Net Neutrality has never ever ever been a thing in Australia: Zero-rating content has been a thing since the 90s: when my friends had a blisteringly-fast-for-the-times 10mbps cable internet package (with, from memory, a 50GB shaped cap), you wouldn't bother downloading something until it hit the BigPond Games site, where the downloads didn't count towards your cap.

Even now net neutrality is not a thing: All of the physical network operators bundle in unrated Netflix or Spotify or, y'know, whatever. They compete on offering the best value-adds, as opposed to competing on crippling the service the least.

I'm thankful for it, but also it strikes me as particularly odd, in the current times where I expect literally every company to be essentially defrauding little old ladies to turn a buck.

Do any fellow Australians have any idea what the real reason for this is? Is it to do with the early legislation demanding Telstra's wholesale & retail structural separation? The mandatory (again, legislated) wholesale of ADSL by Telstra?

Why does Optus (read: Singtel) play ball? Is it because of the aforementioned issues?

I have so many questions.

It took a long time to force this, but aggressive competition by regional ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) forced Telstra to allow access to their ADSL network, and once that was in these and other companies used similar tactics to force open other markets.

Optus aggressively used MVNOs to build market share in mobile markets, and while Telstra still charges a premium the generally decent quality Optus network has kept a cap on how much additional they can charge.

The independent ISPs (especially Internode and iiNet) had excellent reputations for customer service until they were all taken over by TPG.

Nowadays Aussie Broadband has a pretty good reputation and interestingly has basically followed the same model: not always the absolute cheapest, but competes on benchmarks like speed, and with an engineering-heavy management team.

The tl;dr summary of it is because it was a defence against Telstra's monopolistic practices.

Zero Rating developed because of a few factors:

Telecom Australia were the only providers of international internet connectivity because they owned all the landing points in the country.

Telecom Australia also owned the first comprehensive nation-wide data/internet transit fiber network around the country and to many cities.

Telecom Australia (which was originally entirely government owned) really didn't give a damn about competing - you either paid their price, or you didn't get connection.

I believe Optus may have had access on one or more submarine cables, but that was primarily for phone service.

Telecom Australia eventually became Telstra. They also built an ISP called Bigpond, which was their home-internet brand.

I believe it was Southern Cross Cables that was the first carrier-neutral submarine cable, and that wasn't online until mid/late 2000 in Sydney.

So, the zero-rating of data started as a way of letting Small ISP's customers download content from international sites, without it costing the ISP a fortune.

I remember pretty much every ISP had their own little quota-free services that they'd host themselves. Game servers were a big one, along with patches, mods, maps, movies, and even some would provide mirrors for the early music streaming services like DI.fm

At the same time as all this was happening, various ISPs were setting up and/or peering with the first IXs and allowing users to access services on the other ISPs for free. At first this was just within your state, but then some ISPs built up interstate capacity and allowed free access to content in other states.

This was coinciding with the rollout of ADSL, again which outside of the capital cities - was largely a Telstra undertaking at first. For Telstra, they already owned all the copper, fibre, and buildings to put it in - so it was a relatively cheap proposition. There was a lot of disputes between Telstra and ACCC over whether Telstra would be required to provide access to their copper network and also the ADSL Network, and under what terms. Eventually other ISPs won the right to install their own ADSL gear in Telstra exchanges (although Telstra screwed with that as much as possible) and so they built out/extended fibre networks to all the phone exchanges for this.

Telstra also made their own online services (Bigpond Movies/Music/Sports/Games/etc) quota free to their own customers. My understanding is that they still didn't do a settlement free peering for access to that data.

Optus effectively followed Telstra's lead in everything with few exceptions.

I think Shaw sees much better ROI from their last-mile captive DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable customers. Many of whom are on places where the local telco is years away from doing a real GPON FTTH overbuild. So it's 150Mbps+ DOCSIS3 service options vs 10-15Mbps ADSL2+ on long loop length copper.

Having the only difference be case was always bound to cause confusion. :/

The post implies that they found a rate which was $2 for 20gb in the U.K. in their cheapest tarrif - which I assume was some sort of ‘unlimited capped at 200gb for £15’ style deal which would be heavily throtttled.

Most people do not have an option to move across continents just because somethings are cheaper there. And internet service is one small part of overall things one has do deal with in their daily lives.

Another way to cheaper price is that most jobs done in first world is to be outsourced to much cheaper places, which is happening. Or push lot of middle class jobs to subsistence level jobs, which is also happening.

I spend a few months a year in Mumbai, India.

I have a truly unlimited 300Mbps fiber connection as the primary source ($25/Mo), a second 100 Mbps connection from a different company as backup ($10/Mo) and my mobile LTE as the third backup ($10/Mo). AND my international roaming US Google Fi network as the 4th backup for $10/GB :)

This setup does work pretty well for me.The backups have come in handy at times.

My mom had slow DSL for years 6Mbps/1Mbps through the local phone company. They had stopped offering DSL to new customers for years.

I had to stay with her one summer while we were literally between places to stay. Our lease was up and our house was being built.

She got cable internet so I could work. She now has Had both DSL and cable for four years just so she will have backup internet and if she cancels the DSL she won’t be able to get it back.

4 days is pretty good turn around time for most US cities that aren't NY or SF.

My work is entirely online. I haven't worried about not having internet for a while.

I don't live in India, but if it happened in an individual building that sounds like perhaps this was due to management of that building and was just an isolated incident.

So, it's most likely that the cable got damaged due to bad weather (rainy season, laying out cable open to the sky), or the closest switch suffered a damage due to electricity fluctuations. These are the 2 main reasons for internet going down for that long. With me, it usually happens during a power cut. While I have UPS power backup and my router keeps running, it seems the local (geographical) area hub doesn't and internet goes down for 5 minutes.

I meant minutes.

Is it "travel" if you walk 30 metres? :)

If I had to guess the prices probably have more to do with subsidies, general infrastructure quality and competition than resultant quality.

Unless you’re willing to make some huge concessions you won’t find a phone plan with unlimited calling, unlimited texting, and 1GB of data for less than $40 CAD / month. I currently do BYOD + 3Mb/s throttle + no support + low priority on saturated towers (IMO but not provable) for $23 per month.

I wish the government would set reasonable pay per use data rates and make all the carriers abide by them. $12 / GB would be a godsend for low end, price sensitive users.

The real metric to be concerned with should be the cost of the first GB.

Note these are data-only plans, without SMS or calling. We use the Acrobits softphone (iPhone) or the built-in voip client (de-Googled Android) with voip.ms for

- Voice calls

- SMS/MMS (in-app, forwarded to any cell number, or via any email client)

- Transcribed voicemail

- Automatic call recording, and

- Spam-call blocking by configuring an IVR (spam callers can't press "1" to continue).

I've no relation to Acrobits, Fido, or voip.ms aside from being a customer, though I happily recommend all three.

Isn't Fido Toronto only or have they changed that? (it's been a while since I checked)

Also worth mentioning is this marketing thing where each of the major carriers own several cheap carriers. E.g. Roger's has: Fido, Chatr, Cityfone, Primus, Zoomer, and SimplyConnect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_mobile_phone_...

Current plans listed are 4Gb for $10/month, though they would require being paired with a voip provider, as I mentioned above.

Fido is available nation-wide, AFAIK. You're likely thinking of Wind. Originally available in select cities (such as Toronto or Vancouver), they were bought out by Shaw in... 2015 (?) I believe, and renamed to Freedom Mobile. They are currently available in most major cities, and rely on roaming in less densely populated areas.

[1] https://www.fido.ca/consumer/tablets

What is a "Canadian internet plan"? Service is far different in rural Northern Ontario than it is in Toronto.

Firewalls and maintaining them aren't free. Cheaper to let it all pass through, especially when it isn't harmful to the network itself.

It's easy to underestimate how profitable it is to run a telco

This is why most countries have only a few "real" operators that own and operate infra, and tons of virtual operators (MVNO) that run on top of others' gear.

Though my thinking is when selling censorship equipment to a country, you probably charge a country like .pk more because you know they'll find a way to pay for best-in-class.

Services not being available by region, that can be a bummer but that's not really a problem on internet service provider as such.

Also, I am surprised that one more country is building a GFW.

https://community.cloudflare.com/search?q=Pakistan

https://community.cloudflare.com/search?q=Iran

Likely helped by China too, considering it's Pakistan

https://www.zong.com.pk/internet/mbb-plans