UK Consumers Suffer Meagre 4G Mobile Broadband Data Allowances vs EU

A new report from Point Topic has revealed significant variations in 4G based (Mobile Broadband) pricing and usage caps across Europe, with consumers in the United Kingdom paying less for their monthly tariffs but often receiving fairly meagre data allowances in return.

Take note that the telecoms analyst has used $US Dollars for their report and applied a measure of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which allows them to make direct comparisons of tariffs across the world by adjusting the local currency and exchange rate to make the buying power of $1 (PPP) in country A equal to $1 (PPP) in country B (note:£1 = $1.30 at today’s rate).

The study found that the average monthly charge for residential 4G (LTE) services varied from a high of $54 in Cyprus to just $22 in Italy, with the United Kingdom sitting in the cheaper half of the table on $30. However the UK’s lower average charge also reflected a lower average usage allowance and vice versa for some other providers.

Put another way, the average monthly data allowance (GigaBytes) in the UK appears to reside at somewhere around 10GB and that’s in the bottom third of the table (see below). By comparison the average in Finland is closer to 450GB and people in that country only spend an average of $34 per month on their 4G tariffs. It’s a similar story for Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia.

We note that Point Topic’s study only includes SIM-Only 4G data tariffs and those bundled with a modem (no tariffs bundled with other devices such as Tablets or Smartphones are included), which is apparently done because it makes their “analysis more comparable with fixed broadband services which are not normally bundled with PCs and laptops.”

By way of an actual comparison, the figure of $30 equates to about £22 per month. On Vodafone that would get you a 15GB SIM-Only data allowance and it’s also closest to the 20GB tier on Three UK, while EE will similarly do about 15GB for the same sort of money.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the above result also carries a direct association with the average cost per GB of data, which means that Finland, Switzerland and Austria pay less than every other country in the study (around $0.10 cents vs $2 per GB in the UK).

However we should stress that country to country comparison like this are very simplistic and don’t offer a detailed picture of each local market, where different geographies, network maturity, regulation, spectrum ownership, underlying infrastructure and levels of investment may have a significant role to play. Take with a pinch of salt.

Nevertheless it could perhaps be argued that 4G LTE subscribers in Finland, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia are being offered monthly data volumes comparable to those used by many subscribers of a fixed broadband package. The UK is clearly a long way off being able to achieve something similar but then we were also much later to the 4G deployment party than a lot of other EU states (thanks to all that legal fighting over spectrum).

Finally, Point Topic also offers up a table showing the theoretical average downstream speed of residential 4G services in each country, which puts the UK near the bottom, albeit on a little over 100Mbps. However this appears to be based more on headline or theoretical capability than actual performance, which isn’t much use.