Side by Side: What Does a Gigabyte Cost?
Bangladesh’s mobile operators have asked the regulator for deeper cuts in spectrum prices, saying spectrum takes 15.7 per cent of their revenue, so it is worth asking what a gigabyte costs the customer elsewhere.
Grameenphone, Robi and Banglalink renew 79.2MHz of spectrum on 10 November, and their association wrote to the regulator on Sunday: they spend 15.7 per cent of revenue on spectrum, it says, against a global average of 7.7. The customer’s side of the counter is one table. Broadband Genie priced 3,446 SIM-only tariffs in 234 countries in July 2026 and ranked them by the median cost of one gigabyte. Bangladesh’s comes to $0.14, 21st cheapest. Same month, same unit, for the passports at the desk.
Israel
$0.02, second cheapest in the world. Israeli operators have reached the price every regulator dreams of and every operator fears: one that rounds to nothing.
India
$0.06, seventh. For its 3.3GHz band India paid $1.8 to $2.1 million per MHz, The Business Standard notes, against about $6 million per MHz in Bangladesh’s 2022 auction, though the bands differ. India pays less for the airwaves and charges less for what travels through them, which is the arithmetic Dhaka’s operators are hoping somebody will notice.
United Kingdom
$0.27, 46th. Britain charges less than half the American price and four and a half times the Indian one. It sits in the middle of the table, which is where London keeps most of its ambitions these days.
United States
$0.60, 94th: ten times the Indian price and thirty times the Israeli one. The United States would not accept 94th in any other league, and has not been told about this one.
Canada
$0.85, 129th, one cent dearer than Japan at 128th. In a table of 234, Ottawa and Tokyo have finished a cent apart, the closest race in the comparison and the only one Canada leads.
United Arab Emirates
$3.97, 223rd of 234: nearly two hundred times the Israeli price and 28 times Bangladesh’s. The Emirates prefer their records tall. This one is merely long.
Verdict
Israel and India sell the cheapest gigabytes here and the Emirates the dearest by a distance, while Washington, Tokyo and Ottawa crowd together in the expensive middle. London sits comfortably between everyone. Each government auctions the airwaves at a price it calls fair and leaves the gigabyte to the market. And Bangladesh’s operators, by their own account, pay twice the world’s share for spectrum while selling a gigabyte for less than London, Washington, Ottawa, Tokyo or Dubai. They would like the regulator to admire this, and then lower the price.