When visiting the US, I've tried using some of the cheaper, less known providers that they sell in Best Buy (H2GO, Boost) and have never actually gotten data to work, just voice. The only thing that has worked for me is T-Mobile, for which I have to fork out $50 for a month, when I just want 4-5 days.
http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/pay-by-the-day-cell-phone...
Most pre-paid providers in the US go through a MVNO (basically a reseller) affiliated with Sprint. Therefore performance in most cases is terrible. I can burn up a Verizon or AT&T-based mobile phone hotspot pretty quickly thanks to the high speed an low data cap (3-5GB).
There's wifi everywhere, or I think there'd be a bigger push for this. I might only use 300mb of cellular data a month as long as I don't stream or do something like an OS update on mobile.
The mobile data situation for tourists is not good, but this chart and story don't accurately represent the US market for mobile data.
It says it's for prepaid in the title. Its not inaccurate just because it does not measure what you want it to measure.
When I roam from Canada to the US, the incumbents charge something like $1 / 4 KB (yes, KB, not MB) of data for anyone on a post-paid plan, and deny data roaming to pre-paid users. I keep a T-mobile SIM around just for when I visit, even though I only use it for a few months every year.
If the cost of data is the same for 500 MB as it is for 6 GB (most prepaid plans I could find last time I visited were either 100MB with huge overage costs or 2GB+) then the relative expensiveness of the US goes down as the amount of data used increases.
I'm not saying that wireless data in the US isn't expensive -- it is. Besides, financial ITMPs are one of the most effective ways of regulating data use when bandwidth is finite.
I agree with the statement that "prepaid metered mobile data which rolls over and represents less than %0.5 of the market is vastly over priced in the US."
No. Finland has population density 16/km^2, United States has 34.2/km^2
It's not ever correct for urban areas. Population density in Helsinki (urban area) is 1800/km^2 spread out American city like LA has urban area density 3200/km^2.
The number of cell towers is related to number of people using the services. If you have densely populated area you add them more close to each other because ether has bandwidth limits. The cost increases only if the population density is so low that towers are not utilized even when they are as sparsely placed as possible.
I could not find prepaid provider in Finland with strict limits for data transfer. For example in Saunalahti mobile prepaid 0.861 EUR/MB (maximum cost is 1.9 EUR/day, after that data transfer is free). In other words, you get unlimited data transfer for ~$57 per month.
