It’s interesting once in a while to look at how the U.S. compares to the rest of the world in terms of broadband prices. The prices used in this blog come from Broadband Genie, which is a firm that compares local ISP prices in the U.K. For the worldwide price study, it gathered the average broadband prices from 214 countries. Prices were gathered in January and February of this year and are collected from public ISP websites or other trusted broadband comparison websites.
This is far from being a scientific study. Just imagine the difficulty of determining the average broadband price in the U.S. However, the study calculated the average U.S. broadband price of $80, which feels a little high to me, but not by much. You can judge the other prices accordingly. The price comparison doesn’t discuss the availability of broadband in each country, which varies widely across the world. All of the prices quoted below are in U.S. dollars, as calculated by Broadband Genie at the conversion rates at the time of the article. The article includes a database that provides the average cost in the local currency in each country.
There are ten countries with average prices below $10 U.S.. The countries with the lowest-cost broadband are:
Iran $2.61
Ukraine $5.35
Ethiopia $6.46
Bangladesh $7.38
Mongolia $7.41
The most expensive prices are as follows. As might be expected, a lot of the highest broadband prices come from islands, and I imagine the cost of international underwater backhaul has a lot to do with the higher prices.
Eswatini $193.21
Saint Barthelemy $207.26
Turks and Caicos $252.00
Turkmenistan $286.24
Wallis and Futana $373.88
The report also calculates a weighted average price in 22 regions of the world. The lowest prices by region are in Eastern Europe ($15.76) and Northern Africa ($20.83). The highest is Polynesia ($118.48).
Finally, the prices for some of the largest countries include:
India $8.82
Russia $9.71
Indonesia $10.66
China $14.30
Brazil $23.08
South Korea $26.92
France $29.77
U.K. $31.43
Japan $32.62
Germany $47.59
South Africa $50.20
U.S. $80.00
Worth noting here that a large portion of broadband/internet delivery is labor, and so countries with extremely low wages can naturally have cheaper service. When a ‘truck roll’ that would cost me $200 costs them $1.75 you can see how that might affect cost structure.
Further, a good chunk of this list is not countries with proper/complete internet access and the ‘broadband’ tag is wildly inappropriate here.
please, make the argument that $2.61 service in Iran is the equivalent of $50 gigabit in the US, I dare you!