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Why Internet is so cheap in America as compared to other countries?
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India - paying INR 1250 for 2 mbps (gets throttled down to 512kbps after 9GB data transfer) ...
(In terms of purchasing power parity, that's roughly 125 USD/month)
Europe seems to have the cheapest broadband, though.
Ware i live in the UK it's about £40 per month.
.
And i get between 2Mbps to 2.5Mbps and 0.7Mbps upload stable.
With talktalk business and that is the fastest in the area as we are 4 to 5 miles from the BT class 1 exchange with 20cn only
Indeed there are some typical "female" jobs, especially the part-time category, that are poorly paid (I know several people who earn less than € 800 for regular 45 hour jobs, even though in theory there is a general agreement that there should be no full time jobs for less than € 1000 before taxes). But I wasn't referring to those but to the fact that Austria is one of the countries with the highest gender pay gap wordwide. I.e. on average (there are a few exceptions, e.g. in public administration, where income is generally higher and it's almost impossible to get laid off) a woman gets paid significantly less for the same job as a man. Another problem is, of course, that most girls still prefer a dozen or so "easy" but poorly paid jobs instead of investing time and effort to enter more interesting fields that pay a little more. However, due to our very high income redistribution (income tax starts at 36.5% minus a deduction for the first € 11,000 and quickly reaches 50% at € 60,000) whle at the same time there are many benefits for mothers, the unemployed, part-time workers etc. So in the end they could either start sitting at a cash register in the supermarket for a few hours each day when they turn 18, immediately earn € 13-14k net/year (with no perspective of major changes in the future), marry someone a few years leater, have children and stay at home, or spend 6-10 years studying something serious like engineering, mechanics , physics, etc., at the same time work part time for way below average wages to somehow support themselves, sacrifice sleep and private life and start to finally earn 16-22k after taxes when they are in their late twenties. They know that they will get jobs but they will have to compete with men and their career will end sooner (and at much lower income levels) in most cases, just because they are women, so many just give up before evern having tried out, also because we have enormous drop out rates (Austrian universities are cronically underfunded, so they developed the habit of purposely "examining out" a large part of the students during the first few years in order to reduce their number so that the available resources are sufficient for the rather small rest that survives the competition). Which is another risk big factor for them, especially if they come from low-income families (the same is true for men, of course - if you have rich/upper-class parants chances are high that you will finish your studies, independent of the subject you choose, but if you have to move to another city and need to work to pay the bills yourself, your studies will last a lot longer and the odds of completing them at all are firmly stacked against you). So for many young women it seems indeed a rational choice to just take the easy road and earn a little less for a few years but save valuable time and instead use this time, while they are still young and pretty, to enjoy life and to look for someone who will later finance them. Of course, for most of them this doesn't really work out as expected...
Let's say you're fresh out of university with good grades and some experience and apply for a marketing job in a big company and they then assume two men and two women. The men would get about 18-25k depending on their name and negotiation skills while the women are very likely to only get 15-20k even though they will do the exact same job in the same office and they started their jobs on the same day, basically with identical qualifications and experience. And even if the women were better qualified and more experienced, this wouldn't make any big difference in most cases. [Please note that I'm saying this as a man, and I find it absolutely appalling and irrational, just like the random discrimination of people just because their names indicate that their families are not native but once immigrated to this country]. This is aggravated by the fact that income figures are not public, job offers generally only state the legal minimum income for that specific job (there is no general hourly minimum wage in Austria) and job contracts often define the compensation as a secret between the employer, the employee and the tax authorities. In theory, one who signed such a contract could even get fired for disclosing his/her exact income to friends or co-workers. That way it's very difficult to estimate realistic compensation figures for a specific job [published ranges can't be trusted - e.g. recently: senior mutual/pension fund manager for major international bank with several billion under management: 44-130k before taxes, including bonus. Yeah, sure...), and when asked for their expectations during interviews, women tend to be more modest than men and state numbers closer to the published legal minimum figures while men often try much higher numbers based on leaked information (after a dozen beers or so with people who already work there ;-) ). So it's not uncommon that there are huge (>>100%) differences in pay for the same positions in the same company even within men or women, but generally women are paid less than men, and it's also still hard for them to rise above certain levels within the hierarchy in many companies.
The only time I stumbled upon this fact was with inappropriate comparisons (low-end vs. high(er)-end job or part-time vs. full-time) but usually not gender based. Exactly what you said in your second sentence.
This very often comes down to - as you said - negotiation skills and your appearance. Here men might tend to be more aggressive, self-confident, arrogant but a woman with a similar attitude will get the same result.
My point is, I have never experienced a case where a woman was paid less than a man because of her gender. It is either an experience, age (which is discrimination too) or work hour thing or based on purely subjective impressions like the aforementioned appearance/attitude but not so much whether you are a man or a woman. Hence my objection to this eternal dogma that women earn generally less because they are women.
This thread is about internet prices not if men get more then woman as it goes off-topic and don't we have the chestpit for that?
Paying about $60 for a 2mbps link in Nairobi, Kenya
Where do you live @mtwiscool? The internet in my area was stuck in the dark ages for a long time (like... 4 or 5Mb down, 500Kb up). Was pretty good when we first got it in the very early 00s but it was never upgraded or had good maintenance done on it.
The past two or three years though BT have been rolling out their finer in the area and I gotta say it's worlds apart. Yeah it's BT but it's nice having 50/60 down and 10/15 up. If you use BT for your home phone swell and tell them you're thinking of switching given the right deal they should offer you something good. Just be sure to ask for infinity unlimited. I think in the end we pay about £13/m for the net.
@AThomasHowe i live in a small village of 206 people in west Suffolk.
They are no plans for us to get upgraded to BT infinity as BT say it would cost too much to do the work
You do realise how much the roadworks cost BT?
£30 * 206 (thats also saying everyone signs up to BT) = £6,180/m income.
Its peanuts.
I know, I used to live in a village with 2k residents and had the same arguement yearly with them when I had to renew. I moved to the local town and now enjoy 76 down and 24 up.
Whats 4G coverage like there?
That sucks. I live in a pretty small town (the whole area that carries the name is probably 10-20k) but you're in a whole other world!
Maybe mobile internet is an option? Especially as 4G starts to roll out more and more. Depends what you use the net for I guess though, the latency is probably useless for gaming and stuff.
80 homes in a village of about 3x3 miles.
I pay 1500 INR for 8mbps for 160GB bandwidth after which it throttles to 512kbps.
$49.99/month for:
and the town I live in has roughly 500 people living in it.
pay ~$74 (own modem) for Comcast 105/20 (free double speed with call-in from 50/10) which is usually pretty stable since they took over regional cable co and re-built out area for WiFi offering nodes. most people cheap out for DSL ($20 for 6/768k) in the complex i'm at.
Wow ! We pay amount equal to $25 for a 4Mbps line.
16.00 EUR = 21.9154 USD FTTH 100 Mbps, which i recently upgraded to 1 Gbps. No extra cost had to buy a better media converter.
Do i actually use it? No i could do with less 5/5 Mbps. I dont save any costs doing so, im only running it because of low-latency.
That is if you live in a city or well some place newly designed. Luckily im in a villiage with 200 other occupants.
The most rural places get 2 Mbps down / 256 Kbit/s up, CDMA EVDO. 19€
The only horrid thing that mobile operators are starting to raise pricing.
Atm i have 1.5€ for 1000 minutes and 100 sms.
Was offered a package for 10 times more and included 60GB capped mobile data.
So meh.
Last Teliasonera dialup RAS server that gave dialup service to the country was turned off.
So as off 1st Jan. 2014 theres no dial-up possible, unless you wanna call abroad.
Why its so cheap? Because people banded together and started mini-ISPs via either wireless link backhaul in 1997.
10 Mbps wireless shared, however you got ~2 Mbps average. Could not complain since the alternative was dial-up at the time
£25 (~$42) a month for about 60/8 speeds.
Unlimited but throttled if abused.
$20 - 80MBits/sec. + TV, unlimited traffic. South Ural, Russia.
I'm paying $50 usd per month for 1.5mb down and 512kbps up. $250 start-up fee. Too slow for netflix. YouTube buffers playing 480sd videos.
wydebeam.com
OMG, that is so last decade.
Well, its High Speed Internet for your Home, isnt it?
Economy of scale.
I pay 50 euro for internet television and phone. 120mbit / 10 mbit.
I'm paying $25 for 8/1 Mbps (data limited to 6 GB, hate it), IPTV and landline with 100 minutes of talk. In the town I live (population is around 1M) probably the fastest connection you can get is 1 Gbps (it'd be very hard to get though), and that'll cost you a kidney. Oh, and I live in Turkey.
I pay nothing for internet and i don't use any cable TV. What do i win?
Yup american internet ain't that great. Unless your in the areas with fiber, then yea its alright, I have Verizon FiOS and I pay around U$60 for 50/35 mbps
Economy of scale is not what makes Google fiber cheap, they have no scale. Google doesn't need the fiber to do anything other than break even, and maybe not even that. They have gotten concessions from the cities they are in/planning that most private business would never get. I can tell you this from experience.
Google is interested in high speed Internet because they make money from Internet traffic, not because they are a benevolent good-will organization.
I assume the comment was not about Google but in reference to the question.
Then I'm confused because it's been established we don't have "cheap" quality Internet access here, except for Google and a few others here and there.
Here in Montreal with Teksavvy DSL I pay: