UK Ranks 78 Out of 230 Countries for Price of 1GB Mobile Data

A new study has analysed 6,148 mobile data (mobile broadband) plans from across 230 countries in order to compare the cost of a 1GB (GigaByte) data allowance, which found that the United Kingdom has seen its position fall from 59th last year to 78th in 2021, with an average price of USD $1.42 per GB (up from $1.39).

By comparison the United States (USA) came out of Cable.co.uk‘s latest study as “one of the most expensive developed nations for purchasing mobile data“, coming in at 154th in the world (better than last year’s 188th), and with an average 1GB cost of $3.33 – although this is below the global average of $4.07 (down from $5.09 last year). Meanwhile, the cheapest country is Israel ($0.05 per GB) and the most expensive came out as Equatorial Guinea ($49.67 per GB).

In terms of why the United Kingdom has seen such a big fall, the report points vaguely to COVID-19 and the 5G rollout as possible causes without much substantiation, but so far as we can tell neither of those has had a negative impact on data allowances. But 5G has encouraged a rise in “unlimited data” plans from many more operators than last year, which is something that this sort of study cannot properly reflect.

As usual though there is another 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 and salaries etc. Put another way, you might well pay significantly less for 1GB of data in some countries, but that’s not always a balanced 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 2021 Average Cost of 1GB (Mobile Data) by Country