Maybe Finland is an exception here, but they are definitely tiered by speed, with no 'buckets' of data - Finland is the only country I've personally purchased an actual plan in, I've only used prepaid plans elsewhere in europe.
>What you say about subsidized phones is patently false
You are most likely talking about carriers allowing people to finance their phones in europe. Where you can pay an additional 20 euros a month to get the new iphone or whatever.
This is not at all what i'm talking about.
In the US, when you open a cell phone contract, you get a new phone at a discounted price. You sign a contract and you get to choose from the carriers selection of phones, older phones being completely free, newest phones costing 200 dollars.
The rest of the cost of the phone is hidden inside of the cost of the plan itself. There is no line item for how much you are paying for the phone each month, it is simply part of the pricing of the service itself. When your phone has been completely paid off, you will never know because your plans price will not change.
In europe, you finance phones, when they are paid off you stop paying for the phone and you then own the phone. your bill goes down. This is not at all the same behavior as the subsidized phone system in the US.
>German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data
This is what im talking about, this does not exist in the US. There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
There is some subversion by carriers using 'throttling' where they slow certain lines down to a crawl when the carrier decides they've used too much data for the month, but that is by no means a part of how plans are priced.
>So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date
admittedly so, i haven't been in europe for more than a week since 2013 - and have never spent much time in germany
I understand that theres a lot of variety in Europe, but to say that tiers by speed doesn't happen is factually incorrect.
>There's no tradeoff
I never said there was, I am simply pointing out differences in how the markets are set up and function in these vastly different continents
>there's not the same quadrupoly that exists in the US
This is true, this is the biggest problem with the US cellular market today
>That's an interesting attempt to justify the price
I'm not trying to justify anything, just explain some of the differences.
>but it completely fails to take into account that simply calculating area is nowhere near accurate for the number of towers - it depends on where people live
It depends on hundreds of factors - population density, building density, building materials, types of cellular radios used (CDMA vs GSM have different ranges), terrain, interference, number of carriers, etc
The difference in land area is definitely a factor - i never said it was the only one. My mistake was obviously saying '26 times more towers', which i admit was a careless thing to say, but i think it still made my point. The US has significantly more infrastructure than any single european country, in part due to its much larger coverage area.
>Fortunately people live close together, so towers don't need to cover every square inch of the country.
Much truer in Europe than in the US - US: 32.65/sq km UK: 262/sq km [1]
>If you look up the number of towers, you'll find that the US has roughly 120,000 mobile base stations
I see 205,000[2] - which puts the US at ~10 times the towers of the UK
>So your argument does not hold.
do you think that the cost of ~10 times more infrastructure is not part of the higher prices in the US compared to the UK?
My argument was that having to spend much greater amounts on infrastructure is one of the reasons for a price difference, i didn't say it was the only reason or explanation just that it's worth noting.
>I'll never understand how people think that you get "low to no cost upgrades" of hardware.
This is just the psychology of purchasing. People don't like spending a lot of money at once and would prefer to spread costs out over time - I completely agree that the 'subsidized' model is garbage, but i haven't been able to convince a single family member to switch to buying phones outright no matter how many times i show them the lower cost after the full two years.
Of course by low to no cost i meant when you walk into the provider's location after two years, you walk out with a new phone that you paid very little for during that transaction. It doesn't seem to matter to most people that they end up paying more than the phones full retail cost over the course of two years.
A carrier in germany has to build 26 times less towers than a carrier in the US, because germany is more than 26 times smaller than the US.
I would think the increased expenditure of 26 times more towers would increase the cost of plans.
Europe also never had the culture of carrier subsidized phones, and so were never accustomed to paying more in monthly fees in exchange for low to no cost upgrades of hardware.
Tethering varies by carrier in the US - Verizon is legally obligated to allow tethering due to the result of a lawsuit, so they do not charge any extra for this, i believe t-mobile also does not charge for tethering, but it is not related to a lawsuit AFAIK
A final point is that pricing for data is fundamentally different in europe as i understand it. Most plans i am familiar with in europe tier data prices by speed - in the US almost all plans get the fastest speeds available, but it is tiered but amount of data used. You cannot pay for faster speeds on a typical US plan, only for greater amounts of data. The european side of that may have changed, as its been a year or so since i was last in europe looking into this
old? I bought an LG G3 like two months ago for 350 bucks, came with a case, 64GB sd card, and all the original packaging and stuff. Was also in mint contition (the back of the case was scratched up a bit, but i dont really care for cases)
Anecdotal i gues, but if you look around its quite easy to find new flagship phones for very cheap, especially right around when the new iphones come out and people are clamoring to trade up
https://kauppa.saunalahti.fi/#!/matkapuhelinliittymat https://www.dna.fi/liittymat