With the announcement that AT&T will be ending its all you can eat broadband for DSL and U-Verse customers, I decided to take a look at how US broadband compares with the rest of the world.
And I mean beyond Canada.
I perused data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which tracks broadband metrics, among many other economic indicators, internationally.
The US now joins Iceland, Australia, Turkey, Ireland, and the UK, as a place where major ISPs market monthly pricing plans with overusage charges.
From a global perspective, it appears that AT&T’s plan is (gasp) generous: a ceiling of 150 GB for DSL (250 GB for its fiber-based U-Verse) and $10 per 50 GB of additional usage.
In New Zealand, for example, the OECD data shows an average data cap of a mere 26 GB. The UK comes in even lower with a limit of just 10 GB—though less than half the ISPa surveyed employ broadband limits. And, oh Canada, it appears your caps run at the high-end, over 70 GB.
These are averages over many plans across different ISPs. If, for example, you’re a subscriber to Rogers Communications, Canada’s largest cable ISP, and choose its Lite Plan, the party runs out after 15 GB.
Generally these data limits go up depending on the pricing tier you’re in with the usual risk-reward rules kicking in: more expensive tiers have lower overusage charges; less expensive comes with higher penalties.
What’s most interesting is those countries that don’t have data limits, a club that includes Japan, South Korea, France, and Germany.
This group offers the highest broadband rates in the world at some of the best prices (see Berkman reference below).
The common factor among them (with the partial exception of Germany) is regulatory rules that force unbundling of network elements from incumbents and support open access.
Related articles
- Canada Welcomes Nextflix … with lower broadband data caps? (arstechnica.com)
- OECD Broadband Portal (oecd.org)
- Commenting on the Berkman Center’s Broadband Study for the FCC (harvard.edu)
- AT&T adds monthly data caps on home broadband (blogs.consumerreports.org)
