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Fido by the MB

Since my father is in Kenya, he’s now using a cellphone to connect to the internet. I wanted to see how much it would cost him, and in doing so I ended up comparing it to my cell provider, Fido. Shocking. Jaw-dropping shocking.

With Safaricom, he pays 10 Ksh per megabyte, or 17¢. Fido charges 5¢ per kilobyte, or 51.20$ per megabyte. Or, 300 times more.

Now, how about some perspective? A Coke in Canada costs roughly 1$ at a convenience store. A Coke in India costs 5/- Rs., roughly 13¢, or about 1/8 as much. Things cost more here, that’s normal. But not 300 times more. More perspective: A Coke in Norway costs roughly 30, Kr. (6$) at a convenience store. That’s 6 times what we pay here. Norway’s notoriously expensive.

So how much do Norwegians pay for a Megabyte? 25, Kr. — 4.80$. Less than 1/10 what we pay. In fact, their roaming data rates (through Rogers, same base rate as Fido) are less than what we pay locally.

But we’ve got something Norway and Kenya don’t have: A GSM monopoly.

ps. These are the pay-as-you-go internet rates; that is, what you would pay as a user of the network if you don’t have a data plan. You can get it down to 50¢/MB, if you want to pay 100$. Even at 40$, more than most monthly plans, you still pay more than Norway.