UK has cheapest mobile broadband
Yesterday, CCS Insight issued a report that shows the UK is leading the way to cheap mobile broadband in Europe. Of the five leading markets, the UK was the lowest, compared to France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The UK has brought down average prices for mobile broadband to around €17 (£15.20). The country with the highest broadband cost was France, where 4GB of data can cost as much as €85 (£76), but on average users pay twice as much as in the UK.
In these five major European markets, broadband subscribers are expected to rise from 22 million at the end of 2009 to over 43 million in 2011 with revenue rising from €6 billion to €11 billion over the same period. Although most mobile broadband providers charge a flat rate fee for a set amount of usage, in Italy, most tariffs charge on a time-based model. However, this is expected to change somewhat in 2010 with these operators following the trends of their European counterparts.
The prediction of the GSM Association is that this coming growth will help boost the technologies used for mobile broadband which will provide users with better services.
“As the GSM family of technologies continues to evolve and we see increased deployments of HSPA+ and LTE networks, mobile broadband users will experience even faster data rates, more than sufficient to compete with fixed line broadband offerings.”