Weekly Viz 2021-05-10

What Does 1GB of Mobile Data Cost in Every Country?

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 20210510

This week we are looking at the mobile data cost around the world. One might assume that the most developed countries would have cheapeast mobile data costs, but that is not completely true. From this original article, you will find this a much more complicated problem invovling factors like mobile data provider competition, network infrastructure, reliance on mobile device, etc.

My Visualization

With this simple dataset of two columns – country and costs, I made a simple map with some annotations.

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Dashboard link

Insights

• The mobile data cost varies greatly around the world – the cost in the most expensive country ($27.41/GB in Malawi) is over 300 times higher than that in the cheapest country ($0.09/GB in India);
• Surprisingly, mobile data costs in North America countries are on the higher end – US ranked 18th most expensive, and Canada ranked 10th most expensive;
• Also generally speaking, we see the most expensive countries are mostly in Africa, due to lack of infrastructure, while Asia overall show cheaper mobile data costs potentially due to market competition, low labor costs, high reliance on mobile device, etc.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)