> low and expensive—a gigabyte of data costs around $1 in a country where many people make only hundreds of dollars a month.
"Hundreds" is ambiguous, let's conservatively say it's $200. So half a percent of your income went to a plan with 1GB of data. Here in Holland the average (gross) wages was €3073 in 2012 (most recent numbers I can find), and in 2012 €50/month for a plan with 1GB internet was pretty normal. So the Dutch are playing 3-4 times as much of their relative income for data, excluding the fact that they probably pay higher taxes and that 'hundreds' probably means more than $200.
Respectfully, but there were no bandwidth caps in the Netherlands in 2012 [1]. Furthermore, € 50 is an exessive amount of money to be paying for only internet, even in 2012. Perhaps you have mobile internet in mind?
It wasn't stated explicitly in the article but the assumption was that the user will receive 30GB of content by downloading everyday. That makes it $30 a month which is roughly 5%-10% of the average household income. This is mostly useful to show that browsing content on Internet is still a relatively expensive activity for a lot of people around the world.
Didn't look at your numbers closely but I agree that prices for cellular internet are very, very high in Europe. I moved to Germany 2 years ago and I currently pay 37 euros or so for 2GB (horrendously slow, on Edge most of the time). Contrast this with when I go back home (Morocco). I pay 10 euros for 12 Gbs of extremely available access (and many hours of calls for few euros more). I rarely finish it even when on Apple Music for hours a day.
I honestly do not know which plans you refer to. Remember that I mentioned 10GB is worth 10 euros in some other countries (actually less, since I pay 100 Moroccan dirhams, which is less than 10 euros, and yes, it is blazingly fast, I stream Football matches through it). Can you think of any plans even remotely comparable in Germany? I'd switch in a second if there is one; I do not pay for my device and my contract is month-by-month.
"Hundreds" is ambiguous, let's conservatively say it's $200. So half a percent of your income went to a plan with 1GB of data. Here in Holland the average (gross) wages was €3073 in 2012 (most recent numbers I can find), and in 2012 €50/month for a plan with 1GB internet was pretty normal. So the Dutch are playing 3-4 times as much of their relative income for data, excluding the fact that they probably pay higher taxes and that 'hundreds' probably means more than $200.