UK Ranks 59th Out of 228 Countries for Price of 1GB Mobile Data

A new study has analysed 5,554 mobile data (mobile broadband) plans across 228 countries this year in order to compare the cost of a 1GB (GigaByte) data allowance, which found that the United Kingdom has significantly improved its rank to 59th (up from 136th in 2019) with an average price of $1.39 USD per GB (down from $6.66).

By comparison the United States (USA) came out of Cable.co.uk‘s latest study for 2020 as one of the most expensive developed nations for purchasing mobile data, ranking just 188th in the world, and with an median average 1GB cost of $8.00 – well above the global average of $5.09. Meanwhile the cheapest country is India ($0.09 per GB) and the most expensive came out as Saint Helena ($52.50 per GB).

In terms of why the United Kingdom has seen such a big improvement, the finger of suspicion is firmly pointed at the fairly recent advent of “unlimited data” plans by Vodafone, O2 and EE (BT). Previously only Three UK seemed to offer such plans but they have now become much more common and that has had a big impact.

As usual though there is a significant catch to this study because, so far as we can tell, the average prices do not appear to have been weighted in order to reflect the often huge differences in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) between countries. In other words, take these results with a big pinch of salt, although they may still be useful for understanding different markets.

The application of PPP is vitally important because there can be massive differences between countries in terms of things like taxation, infrastructure standards or deployment costs, size of the state and salaries. Put another way, you might well pay significantly less for 1GB of data in some countries but that’s not always a fair real-world comparison.

We should add that several countries are missing from this report (North Korea, Eritrea etc.) due to either a lack of publicly available data or a lack of comparable data types. Furthermore in the handful of cases where only “unlimited data” deals are available in a certain country, the average data usage, per user, in that country was used to calculate the cost of 1GB.

The 2020 Average Cost of 1GB (Mobile Data) by Country