[reissbaker]

France allows companies to have more onerous locking policies than the U.S. is proposing. French telecom companies are allowed to sell locked phones, require customers to request unlocks (rather than auto-unlocking, like the U.S. proposed rules), and the companies are allowed to take up to 3 months to respond to unlock requests, rather than requiring immediate unlocks after the first 60 days pass.

I like unlocked phones, and I buy my phones unlocked. But I agree with the sentiment here that we already know what the prices are for unlocked phones: manufacturers will sell them to you at that price, and telecom operators in the U.S. will universally allow you to bring your own, unlocked device free of charge. What the companies offering locked phones offer is an optional subsidy in exchange for a locked phone; while I'm sure there are reasonable arguments around e-waste that result in wanting some limits to locking, there is an obvious tradeoff in that the value of the subsidy diminishes as the allowed lock time diminishes. Mandating short limits to phone locks raises prices for poor people who can't afford unlocked phones. It's not always bad to do that — sometimes companies are taking advantage of poor people — but it's pretty true that will happen.

[makapuf]

Keep in mind that prices in France are WAY lower than in the US according to this site. https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/ (edit: bad autocorrect)

[reissbaker]

We are discussing the price of smartphones, not the price of data plans.

The infographic also seems pretty wrong, FWIW, especially considering that many US plans are uncapped and thus price/GB depends on usage. (There are sometimes, but not always, throttles past large amounts of usage eg 50GB/month, but since most of these plans cost less than $50/month, it seems extremely unlikely that most people are paying $6/GB as the website is claiming.) Verizon's "Visible" brand, for example, offers plans for $25/month with "unlimited" (soft cap at 60GB) data, for an effective $0.41/GB assuming you use up to the throttle limit. Even non-unlimited plans can be quite cheap; T-Mobile, for example, offers prepaid data plans for as little as $1/GB.

[makapuf]

The site may be wrong and thanks for the inputs. However you can compare it to a French plan of 14€ per month for 140GB (and then throttled) by example and there are maybe cheaper prices per gb.

[pkaye]

Are people paying $6/GB on average in the US?

[reissbaker]

No, the UK-based website is wrong. There are enormous numbers of plan options in the US, and their sampling methodology was probably bad. You can get reasonably good 5G plans for $1/GB in America; probably cheaper if you're willing to go with smaller/worse providers.