How expensive South Africa’s mobile data prices really are – #DataMustFall

Tariffic has released a new #DataMustFall international pricing comparison, which shows how South Africa compares with other countries on mobile data prices.

“#DataMustFall is trending, but how do South Africa’s data prices really compare to the rest of the world?” Tariffic asked.

“Data packages are under the Tariffic spotlight, comparing the price which South Africans pay for “data only” packages to comparative countries around the world,” it said.

The results show that South Africa has the second highest data contract prices in the group, coming second only to Brazil.

The research was conducted by identifying data contract prices from the leading mobile network operators in BRICS-member countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), Kenya, and Australia.

These prices were compared against the average data contract prices across all of the South African mobile network operators.

Tariffic said that you cannot simply convert the prices of the various data contracts to rands to get comparable results, as this does not take into account the cost of living in the various countries.

As an example, spending R10 in South Africa is worth a lot more to South Africans than the equivalent of R10 is worth to Chinese in China.

To ensure that the company compared apples-with-apples, all figures were rebased against the “Cost of Living index”.

Tariffic’s analysis shows that, once prices were converted to rands and re-based for the Cost of Living, South Africa was consistently the second most expensive for 1 GB, 2 GB, and 3 GB data contracts.

Data prices for South Africa were on average 134% more expensive than the cheapest prices in the group.

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