PTS, the Swedish regulator released its report on “Price progression in Mobile Telephony and Broadband Access (Swedish). This is an interesting follow-up on the recent user statistics. Picking a few interesting numbers
- The average cost for mobile telephony for at typical user is down by 15% since last year (over 60% since 2005). Interesting to note is that the per-minute charge nowadays is very low (zero in many subscriptions) but the fixed (“opening”) charge per call keeps increasing and the charging interval is now 60 seconds in most cases.
- The average cost for mobile broadband is almost halved since last year. A significant problem is the discrepancy between advertised data rates and actually measured data rates (and response times) – see the figure from the report below that shows the measured rate in percent of the advertised rate (“up to”-rate) for some (anonymous) operator subscriptions (both mobile and fixed). Not surprisingly – the high-rate 3G subscriptions are the most disappointing.
