Study of developed markets: US has the 5th highest per gigabyte prices in 4G smartphone plans and is the most expensive market in wireless home broadband plans
Karl Bode / Motherboard : Tweets: @felixsalmon , @openmediaorg , and @vgul Tweets: Felix Salmon / @felixsalmon : Verizon's 100GB mobile hotspot plan: $710/mo. The same plan in Europe: €10 to €20 per month. http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... @openmediaorg : “Monopolies nobody wants to fix and regulators beholden to an industry they're supposed to hold accountable go a long way toward explaining the US ranking.” And it could get even worse as T-Mobile and Sprint push for a merger: http://ow.ly/... Vishal Gulati / @vgul : What you are hearing is the sweet sound of free markets working US Wireless Data Prices Are Among the Most Expensive on Earth https://buff.ly/2S6wAzO cc: @jtepper2 pic.twitter.com/mXcqt7V77s
Context & Ripple Effects
The pricing study lands on a US wireless market whose performance record was already poor: the OpenSignal report had the US at 55th globally in LTE download speeds two years earlier, and cellular data revenues broke a 17-year streak of quarterly growth in early 2017. Now the same market shows up as 5th-highest in per-gigabyte 4G pricing and the single most expensive for wireless home broadband among developed peers.
Open Media's framing — monopolies regulators won't fix — gives the numbers a policy hook, and the timing matters: the T-Mobile–Sprint merger push is live, meaning the study feeds directly into the argument over whether fewer national carriers means higher consumer prices.
First-order effects
- US consumers are paying developed-market-leading rates for both 4G smartphone data and wireless home broadband while receiving below-average network speeds, sharpening the value gap versus European plans like the €10–20 hotspot tiers cited in the coverage.
- The findings hand merger opponents a concrete pricing datapoint just as T-Mobile and Sprint seek approval to combine, raising the bar for claims that a third national carrier keeps prices down.
Second-order effects
- With data revenues already declining after years of uninterrupted growth, the big three carriers face a squeeze between flat demand and premium pricing, pushing them toward consolidation, bundling, or upselling costlier unlimited tiers rather than per-gigabyte competition.
- Verizon's capital-intensive path — later visible in the $118.4B the carriers sank into 5G airwaves and upgrades with little revenue to show — pressures the same carriers to defend high domestic prices as the return on spectrum spending lags.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the US locks into a structural divergence from European markets: a concentrated carrier set, regulator capture, and premium pricing coexisting with middling network quality, making affordability a recurring regulatory battleground rather than a competitive outcome.
- Persistent high prices plus weak competition push consumers toward fixed alternatives where they exist, widening the gap between well-served urban markets and the less-populated areas that mid-band 5G was supposed to reach.
The trend: The US wireless market is consolidating around fewer carriers charging developed-market-leading prices even as its network performance trails European peers, keeping pricing power with incumbents.