Background: Walletwyse just re-launched the mortgage & car calculators, emphasizing the role of monthly operational costs in total cost of ownership. This got me thinking about relative cost of items (like internet utilities) that don’t take up a huge chunk of budget in the U.S., but can be massive costs elsewhere.
With the ability to compete (and to arguably even just function) in a modern economy increasingly dependent on reliable broadband internet, I thought it would be interesting to show the cost of internet as a utility relative to the average monthly wages, by country. I wasn’t surprised that internet is cheaper in East Asia and much of Europe than it is in the U.S., but I was a bit surprised that it is relatively inexpensive in India, and that broadband in Russia seems to be quite affordable. Would be curious to hear from the global redditor community on the accuracy of this dataset.
Data: Numbeo’s internet cost by country and income by country.
Tool: Datawrapper
Dataset: Google Docs
h/t kylekun513