In a cross-country comparison of mobile data pricing, ABI Research has found that T-Mobile UK and Indosat in Indonesia offer the lowest prices for mobile broadband plans. Indosat offers an unlimited data usage plan called StarOne BIS for a monthly flat rate of $13.52, while T-Mobile UK’s unlimited data usage plan, Mobile Broadband Plus, costs $15.47 per month.

Asian telecommunications companies have some of the lowest-priced plans in this comparison. Prices in this region are kept low because companies such as Singtel, Indosat, BSNL and China Unicom are linked with their respective governments. However, some of these governments are slowly loosening their control over the telecommunications sector.

Italian operators offer some unique payment methods for their services by charging customers on a per-hour usage basis. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo goes against the global mobile data pricing trend with a per-packet charge. A packet constitutes 128 Bytes and the Japanese are charged according to the number of packets used instead of the usual MB or GB.