Maps reveal what countries have the most affordable mobile data
“Time is money,” they say. Depending on where in the world you are, data can be expensive, too.
But when judging the value of a country’s mobile data plans, you need to take all three variables into account. What use is cheap data if you spend minute after minute waiting for it to load?
It’s a question many of us asked as the world slowed down for the COVID-19 pandemic. If you thought your mobile connection had symptoms of coronavirus, you were right: the whole world got bored and went online at the same moment. Mobile broadband speeds fell to half their regular speed in the area around Wuhan,
China in January 2020. Two months later, New York’s broadband connections slowed by a quarter.
However, data is getting faster in general. The average mobile download speed rose from 22.81 Mbps to 27.69 Mbps in the 12 months up to July 2019. And 5G promises to deliver speeds over 1 Gigabit per second.
To figure the state of play, Top Dollar gathered the cost and speed of mobile data in every country. They compared the price to Mbps (megabits per second) to find the best value around the world and price-per-1GB to average local income to see where mobile data is most affordable.
