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by rshlo 2911 days ago
In Israel you can get unlimited minutes + text + 30GB data for $10 a month. If you want to include around 200-300 minutes to call out of the country you can get to $13 dollar. The premium packages cost $30 and include calls + data when abroad. All that on an LTE network.
2 comments
tedmiston 2910 days ago
My roughly equivalent US plan on AT&T is ~10x that.

Don't get me started on the international. $60/GB for a pass or insanely $2,050/GB pay-per-use without a pass [1]. The rate is higher than that in some cases too [2]. It really should be illegal. Of course this is on top of the normal data plan charge.

They also have another day pass plan for $10/day that allows you to use your normal data plan internationally [3], however, only a subset of AT&T plans are eligible for it.

[1]: https://www.att.com/offers/international-plans/world.html

[2]: https://www.att.com/offers/international-plans/ppu-calling-m...

[3]: https://www.att.com/offers/international-plans/day-pass.html

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arijun 2910 days ago
That's a fairly recent development, though; they recently broke up the cell phone cartels that were charging outrageous rates in exchange for very poor service.
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aerotwelve 2910 days ago
This is something we desperately need to do here, but I don't much faith we'll do it anytime soon.

Bell got 50+ years to extract incredible amounts of cash from their customers (who had, quite literally, nowhere else to go). Then it was broken up and prices fell dramatically, which sounds close to what happened in Israel?

Unfortunately, we clearly didn't learn anything from this, and we let the small companies formed from the Bell breakup buy each other up -> consolidate the industry again -> eliminate most of their competition, and we wonder why we're getting screwed again.

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