Am I missing something or are Brits being ripped off?

Hi. I'm a Brit living in Denmark where I use a 4G mobile broadband connection. Router/modem is a Huawei 8310s. I get varying speeds between 25 and 35Mbps down and 8-9Mbps up - i.e. perfectly adequate for most things. For 100GB a month I pay the equivalent of £15/£16. No installation fee, no hidden charges. Although this price is exceptionally low, mobile services are offered by all the local operators nationwide. My particular deal is through an operator that uses 3's Danish mobile network.
I'm looking for a similar deal in the UK for my niece who lives in Fareham but it doesn't seem to exist. Most of the broadband offers I find are cable and any 4G offers (e.g. Relish) seem to be very local.
So back to my question - am I missing something or are Brits being ripped off? Or both?
Thanks in advance for any replies.
Johar

One of the best deals is with EE i think its £50 for 50GB per month

so yes it is a rip off.

In reply to a post by Johar:

So back to my question - am I missing something or are Brits being ripped off? Or both?
Thanks in advance for any replies.
Johar

To put it simply yes, us Brits are being ripped off.

The most likely reason for us having quite limiting tariffs is that carriers who own the masts/network that you connect to are unwilling to upgrade things like backhaul which means instead they place limits on how much each person uses it. Or put simply; many companies over here tend to be more stubborn and don't invest in their infrastructure as much as in other countries.

If the above was not correct, you would have thought that with a population of a little over 5.6 million, Denmark would on paper, look more expensive since the customer base is smaller compared to the population of 64 million in the UK.

The closest thing I think you'll get to unlimited/100GB on a mobile connection here (Consumer grade) is probably the 3 'All you can eat' plan.

I'm sure someone else here has it who could elaborate more on it. But as I understand it, it's unlimited with no fair use policies.

Thanks epyon and chris6273. Good to know it's not me! I think you're probably right about the infrastructure, chris. In urban areas here, the fibre and mobile networks are very well developed with plenty of competition. Out in the sticks, it's the same old problem, of course.
Since posting my question, I've found a mobile broadband deal on EE for 32GB a month for £28, which is expensive by Danish standards, but worth considering.
Cheers

Possibly, but try buying a car in Denmark...

True - but the extortionate price of cars (180% registration duty) is more than balanced out by the price of housing.
We also have 25% VAT - even on food. But then I can deduct the whole of my mortgage interest, plus the interest on any other loans (including for buying the expensive car), from my income before being taxed. And so we can see why there is not a cat's hope in hell's chance of ever having a synchronised EU tax system. But that won't bother you lot after Thursday, will it?

The Danish and UK tax systems are poles apart. By coincidence I met a Dane at the local bus stop looking for a house to rent. He was moving to the UK as he was a graphics programmer and all the work was in the

Not that Denmark doesn't have it's own EU sceptics. After all, the Danish People's Party polled 21% in the last general election UKIP only reached 12.6% in the 2015 GE.

So we'll see following Thursday. It's going to be a close one. The exit polls will be interesting.

In reply to a post by epyon:

One of the best deals is with EE i think its £50 for 50GB per month

so yes it is a rip off.

Hmm,
it costs me £40 per anum,
it's (in theory) unlimited,
but it works very poorly,
possibly because I have no line of sight
and there is too much vegetation.
I can use it for email and browsing,
but some times it's get too frustrating,
and I give up.
Downloading something substantial is out of the question.
But I don't need no phone line, so it's cheap.

And NO, won't give you details, 'cos the provider would almost certainly have to stop it if
more people took advantage !

Yes, the mobile providers could do much better....,
if they did not concentrate on flogging ever more expensive phones and phone contracts.

We need several dedicated Mobile BB providers !
Regards,
Martin

Spectrum is a scarce resource, and each GB you consume costs money to provide. It is the cost of spectrum that governs the cost of each GB.

UK consumers are still effectively paying for the stupidly high bids paid for the 3G spectrum in 2000.

In the 4G auctions, the UK government was paid £2.5bn, while the Danish government was paid £0.2bn ... around the same amount per capita. I think the Danes valued the 800MHz spectrum at about half that in the UK, but valued the 2600MHz spectrum higher.

So ... pretty similar total prices for 4G.

Comparing Three specifically, the Danish company paid £0.7m for 10MHz of 2600MHz spectrum, and nothing in the 800MHz spectrum. Meanwhile the UK company paid £225m for just 5MHz of the 800MHz spectrum, and nothing in the 2600MHz spectrum. That's quite a difference, right?

Meanwhile, the 3G auctions cost UK mobile companies £22bn - an amount that pretty much sunk the mobile business here. This amount was paid in the expectation that we'd gobble up data-hungry apps, and pay a vast amount more per month ... sadly, not true. And we continue to pay the price for this in £ per GB.

While the UK mobile companies were paying £500 per capita for 3G spectrum, the Danish ones (whose auction was a year later, with lessons learned) were paying just £75 per capita.

Hugely different prices paid for 3G.

The UK companies have to make their books balance, and they don't really care whether you are using their 3G or 4G spectrum; it all needs to be paid for somehow.

In the end, a big chunk of each month's income is going towards the cost of funding the spectrum auction. Not so much is left to buy the equipment that gives you capacity in the network. Which means the operators need to cause users to NOT consume GB (so they can get away with less hardware) while still paying a monthly fee.

Well, thanks for that WWWombat. Very interesting indeed. So that's how it works.
Reminds me a bit of the auctions for the Premier League rights which results in everyone who buys a TV package pouring their hard-earned cash into the pockets of some little gutter-snipes who can kick a ball around.
Which is why I have an indoor aerial and a digital decoder.
J.

Why are you not looking at fixed line connections for her out of interest?

Mobile data is not really used as a home broadband replacement in the UK.

Generally you will get a few GB of mobile data, and use WiFi at home, provided over a BT or virginmedia cable line.

So you should be looking at things such as BT Infinity, TalkTalk Fibre, Sky Fibre, Virginmedia, PlusNet Fibre instead. Unless for whatever reason they cannot get anything decent over a fixed line.

Most deals are unlimited.

Also you think our prices are expensive, but the US and various EU countries are more pricey.

Just adding to brandscill's post here...

Also it is generally not appropriate in the UK to use mobile data for a home broadband connection, some have done it over network 3, but the mileage and results vary massively and generally it is not advised.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sat 25-Jun-16 13:31:42)

Yes, I can see that there are big differences between how the markets in the two countries are set up.
Here in Denmark, I had a cable broadband connection giving me 50Mbps download but I could only have it with an expensive TV package in which most of the channels were free ones and the others were of no interest. Irritated by these conditions, I started looking at alternatives and discovered that I can get a perfectly good TV reception from an internal aerial on the first floor, coupled with a mobile broadband connection which gives me a variable speed between 25Mbps and 35 Mbps (perfectly acceptable) with a limit of 100GB per month - so far this month my wife and I have used just over 30GB. The TV+cable link costs about £45 per month; the mobile broadband costs about £16.50 per month, so it's a no brainer. But I can see the UK is different (in more ways than one after "Independence Day" haha - joke of the week).

She says there is some problem with the cables to the house she is renting. BT want some extortionate installation fee. So I started looking at reproducing my Danish set-up but I can see that the two markets are very different.

They can't sustain these speeds on those kind of usage limits. LTE has very limited spectrum available to it, even using LTE-A bonding.

Expect to see in the near future very poor peak time speeds. Then the usage limits will get cut, or prices will go up to cover the capex of installing more cells.

The exact same thing was available to 3UK subscribers - £15/month for unlimited 3G/4G data (which was ok to use as personal hotspot).

Guess what - they ended the plans as they are getting too much contention.