What the same gigabyte costs, country by country

Why «price per gigabyte» gets this wrong

The obvious comparison is to take each country’s best-value plan and divide price by gigabytes. Run that over this catalogue and the spread comes out at 43× — from $0.60 per GB in Austria to $25.99 in Lebanon.

That number is wrong, and the reason is visible in the catalogue: Lebanon has exactly one plan, a 1 GB one. So does Zimbabwe. There is nothing to divide. Price-per-gigabyte does not measure whether a country is expensive — it measures whether the country has a large plan to average across, and a country with only a starter plan will always look extortionate.

Compare the same product instead. A 1 GB plan exists in 201 of the 204 countries in the catalogue, so it is a fair yardstick. On that basis the real spread is 4.8×, and 112 countries sit at or below the $4.99 median.

Every country, cheapest first

Our retail price, computed from the wholesale cost on the same rule everywhere — no country is marked up by hand. Where a country sells more than one 1 GB plan, the cheapest is shown. Read from the catalogue on 13 September 2026; prices move when the catalogue does.

The 3 with no 1 GB plan to compare

These are not missing from the table because they are expensive. They simply do not sell a 1 GB plan, so there is nothing to line up against the others — putting them in on a different size is exactly the mistake this page is about.