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#11
Originally Posted by YoDude View Post
What's going on in the UK with 121% saturation?

1. Brits travel between competing carriers coverage areas often and must carry multiple phones in order to insure that they can be "reached."

2. It's popular in England to activate lines on your family plan for your unborn children.

3. Cell phone contracts are so hard to get out of that many have lines they no longer use but still pay for.

or;

4. How many working cell phones someone has clipped to their belt indicates their suitability for mating. It is part of a complex mating ritual in the UK and is sometimes accompanied but the seldom seen ritual "multiple ring tone" dance.

(citations needed )
I don't know about UK, but I can give you a couple of examples from Finland which has 115% penetration according to the graph.

Mobile phones have quickly replaced landlines. 73% of households in Finland don't have a landline anymore. They have effectively been replaced by mobile phones. Every member of the family has one so there's no need for a landline.

The same thing is happening in companies. When you used to have a phone sitting on your desk, you now have mobile phone.

Subscriptions are also not exclusively used for calling people. We have a cottage in Lapland, 1000 kilometers away. It has electricity, but it isn't heated around the year. The cottage has a device with a SIM card that can turn the heating on when a SMS is sent to it. In winter it's nice to be able to turn it on remotely so the cottage is warm when we arrive there.

Originally Posted by quipper8 View Post
Seeing as cellular service has a lot to do with the propagation distance of waves, I assume you could add a set of data to that and show that the less dense the population, the higher the nationwide average cost of cellular coverage. So as people per square mile goes down, average cell phone plan cost goes up. This is just a hypothesis, somebody with more time feel free to do the extrapolation

That link did not have average cost for either canad or australia, both of which are less population dense than US and which I expect would have higher costs
Population densities:

Finland 15,6/sqkm
Sweden 20/sqkm
US 31/sqkm

Now with this data you can check the chart again. Finland and Sweden were the least expensive countries. The population density certainly isn't the only factor to blame.

Last edited by jsa; 2009-08-30 at 01:48.
 

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#12
It's not population density as much as it is pure area there is to cover. The US, Canada, and Australia have a HUGE area to cover for any carrier that hopes to succeed. In a smaller country, there's less area to cover, so there's less cell towers needed. It would be MORE interesting to see how the prices compare to how many cell towers are needed to give service everywhere.

Heck, let's take this to an extreme. If the cell towers could send out their best signal all the time, and there was no interference, etc., how many cell towers would it take to give an area the size of the US cell coverage? A lot more towers than Finland would need, I'm sure.
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#13
Originally Posted by TrueJournals View Post
It's not population density as much as it is pure area there is to cover. The US, Canada, and Australia have a HUGE area to cover for any carrier that hopes to succeed. In a smaller country, there's less area to cover, so there's less cell towers needed. It would be MORE interesting to see how the prices compare to how many cell towers are needed to give service everywhere.

Heck, let's take this to an extreme. If the cell towers could send out their best signal all the time, and there was no interference, etc., how many cell towers would it take to give an area the size of the US cell coverage? A lot more towers than Finland would need, I'm sure.
Yes, of course they have bigger areas to cover. But in the US they have 300M people paying for the construction of the cell towers while in Finland we have 5M. It still boils down to population density.
 

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#14
I think that Japan went on an infrastructure-updating trip a few years back -- one of those rev up your failing economy efforts, which unfortunately didn't work, but it did leave Japan with a bunch of way advanced features that are not used much -- but it did create a heckova lot of debt. Maybe the fast and cheap mobil service is part of that.

Still, I'd like to see us try something similar in the US.
 
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#15
Hmm, I don't know, I don't feel screwed because I used to pay by the minute for using the Internet. Now its a nice FUP. Phoning over VoIP (from landline) is very cheap, at least for me. Cell to cell is cheap too, and I tend to not perform much chit-chat over cellphone.

I wonder where they get their numbers from.

Does it include 3G?

What about VoIP?

Is prepaid included in the statistics?

Originally Posted by YoDude View Post
What's going on in the UK with 121% saturation?
Prepaid. Having old phone lying around. One phone for work one for pleasure. Netbooks, laptops, e-book readers. Some anti-theft systems use GPS and GSM/3G these are found in expensive cars but getting more common. And Vodafone is British. Maybe CCTV uses that too? Hihi.
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#16
I used to pay by the meg for Internet. I had to jump on the Metro and go to Smolenskaya, talk my way past a security guard, find my way up five floors to the ISP office and plunk $100 cash American down, often more than once a week. Ah, Moscow nostalgia...
 

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#17
Originally Posted by jsa View Post
Yes, of course they have bigger areas to cover. But in the US they have 300M people paying for the construction of the cell towers while in Finland we have 5M. It still boils down to population density.
Very true. I use to think it was just a land/cost issue but if we have more space and people it follows there's more money from more people to build.
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#18
OK, then let's look at it like this: cell phone subscriber density. The people who aren't paying for the cell phones don't affect the price of cell phones, so they shouldn't be included in these numbers...

The US has ~263,000,000 subscribers, over an area of 9,631,000 sqkm. That's about 27.3 cell subscribers per sqkm (quite a bit lower than the population density).

Finland has ~6,100,000 subscribers over an area of 338145 sqkm. That's about 18 cell subscribers per sqkm (a little higher than the population density).

Sweden has ~10,300,000 subscribers over an area of 449,964 sqkm. That's about 22.9 cell subscribers per sqkm (a little higher than the population density).

So, the numbers kind of show again that US cell service should be cheaper than these other countries...

How about advertising? There's A LOT of advertising for cell service in the US... what about other countries?
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#19
Subscriber density is just one aspect of the whole equation, and shouldn't be used as a motivator for higher prices.

Consider the infrastructure of a cellular network is a digital network, the cost for data weather its voice data, digital data or SMS Data is the same.

So the cost a voice data is the benchmark, there is no reason then that digital data should cost 500% more and SMS data 1000% more.

The higher the population density the easier it is to justify high bandwidth infrastructure like 3G. so I would argue that a low population density just affects speed and quality of service.
 
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#20
Actually... SMS data (text messages) is not the the same as voice and web data. Text messages sneak into the channel used to set up calls. So, if the tower is flooded with text messages, then calls can't go through to the user/can't be made. This is one way the carriers can justify charging outrageous amounts for texts...

As for voice vs. web data, I'm not really sure about the technicalities of sending those over the air to a phone... but if they DO take up the same airspace, then if someone is using data constantly, phone calls will be dropped, or won't be able to go through. Remember that the primary usage of cell phones is for calling people. Phone calls need to take priority over other applications of the network.
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