dw-data/mobile-internet

In Malawi, people have been paying around 87% of gross national income per capita for 1GB of mobile data. Rwandans only pay 2%. DW examines the reasons for this huge price discrepancy. # Prices for mobile internet in African countries You can read the story here in English or German Idea, research and writing: David Ehl Data analysis and visualization: Gianna-Carina Grün ## Data sources ### Mobile data prices The **source** for mobile internet prices is the British telecom provider Cable UK, given that they provided the most recent data (beginning of 2020). The data was downloaded from their website. There, they also included more detail on the scope of their research project: *Data from 5,554 mobile data plans in 228 countries were gathered and analysed by Cable.co.uk between 3 February and 25 February 2020. The average cost of one gigabyte (1GB) was then calculated and compared to form a worldwide mobile data pricing league table.* **Key variable description** According to their methodological description of the data the core variables in the dataset are defined as follows: * "Plans measured": *Researchers first established the mobile data providers in each country before selecting one SIM plan from each data amount they offer. A country with eight providers, for example, each offering three different SIM data sizes, will have 24 plans recorded (...) Packages were recorded up to a maximum of 60 per country – records beyond this number have negligible impact on the average (...) This number will always be between 3 and 60.* * "Average price": *Averages are calculated as the MEDIAN of all recorded package prices/data limits. (...) The average monthly cost of 1GB of data for each country as a whole is calculated as the MEDIAN of every plan recorded* * "Sample date" / Price data : *The 'Sample date' column is very important as it represents the day the data was collected for that particular country. It is a snapshot. Prices change all the time and therefore may be different by the time you go about viewing and/or utilising our data* **Gaps in the data**: According to their description, the following African countries missing from the …