This page illustrates the huge differences in price between different types of Internet access, as well as some other data communication services. We do this by converting the price of each service into a common measure of U.S. dollars per megabyte and plotting them as a bar graph with a logarithmic scale.
Without further ado, here's the graph:
Click on a bar for more information |
Sony Nuro, Japan, 2013 |
M1 Fibre 100 mbps 2 year promotion, Singapore, 2013 |
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp 100 Mbps broadband, Japan, 2006 |
Hetzner Online colocation excess traffic, Germany, 2016 |
Yahoo 12 Mbps broadband, Japan, 2003 |
Sonera ADSL 24/1 Mbit/s, Finland, 2009 |
Saunalahti Tuplalaajakaista 10+Nopsa, Finland, 2012 |
Cox Cable, United States, 2003 |
BD-R via US First Class International rate, United States, 2012 |
Welho Pro cable internet, Finland, 2003 |
Telmex Infinitum, Mexico, 2009 |
1 Gbps transit, United States, 2005 |
Free.fr ADSL, France, 2004 |
SBC PacBell DSL 1.5 Mbps, United States, 2002 |
DNA Nettikaista 384 mobile broadband, Finland, 2009 |
Megapath SDSL, United States, 2004 |
Amazon EC2 outgoing transfer, first 10 TB/month, United States, 2008 |
Netissimo, France, 2004 |
1 Mbps transit, United States, 2005 |
Zen Active ADSL, United Kingdom, 2013 |
Proposed Hungarian Internet tax, Hungary, 2014 |
CD-R by first-class US mail, United States, 2002 |
Amnet 256K DSL, Costa Rica, 2002 |
meer.net SDSL, United States, 2003 |
Sonera Sopiva Pro 4G excess traffic charge, Finland, 2014 |
Donobi 100Mbps personal access, United States, 2003 |
East Buchanan Telephone Cooperative (EBTC) 5 GB tier, United States, 2014 |
EE 4G petabyte bundle, United Kingdom, 2013 |
MTV3 ISDN dialup, Finland, 2003 |
prepaidsimcard.org 1GB data-only SIM, United Kingdom, 2013 |
Islandssimi DSL, Iceland, 2003 |
EU mobile broadband roaming price cap, 2014 |
EU mobile broadband roaming price cap, 2009 |
Sonera GSM cellular data calling plan, Finland, 2000 |
T-Mobile GPRS, United States, 2003 |
AT&T Terrestar satellite data service, United States, 2010 |
Sonera GPRS Basic, Finland, 2003 |
T-Mobile cellular data, United States, 2002 |
O2 Loop Prepaid GPRS, Germany, 2005 |
AT&T international data roaming, 2007 |
AT&T international GPRS data roaming rate, United States, 2010 |
T-Mobile XtraData GPRS, Germany, 2005 |
At-sea email via InmarSat (via analog modem), 2003 |
Sonera GSM Short Message Service, Finland, 2000 |
MySatMail.com Basic Service Plan, 2009 |
$0.01 $0.10 $1 $10 per kilobyte |
$0.01 $0.10 $1 $10 $100 $1000 $10000 per megabyte |
$0.01 $0.10 $1 $10 $100 $1000 $10000 per gigabyte |
$0.10 $1 $10 $100 $1000 $10000 per terabyte |
The difference in price between the lowest-cost and the highest-cost services is more than ten orders of magnitude; in other words, the cost per bit of the most expensive service is more than ten billion times that of the least expensive one.
We'd like to extend the graph with more types of connections and with more up-to-date information. By adding your own bandwidth cost, you can see how it compares to the existing entries, and help us build a more comprehensive database.
If you add a new entry it will initially be displayed only to you, highlighted in red in the graph above. The submission will then be reviewed by a human, and if approved, made visible to all viewers.
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