U.S. LTE Costs More Than Elsewhere: Why is the Question

A comparison by Wireless Intelligence, a unit of the GSM Association, suggests that being in the biggest LTE market has not brought low prices to U.S. consumers.

According to the study, Verizon Wireless charges $7.50 for each gigabyte of data downloaded over its LTE network.

That is three times the European average of $2.50 and more than 10 times what consumers pay in Sweden, where a gigabyte costs as little as 63 cents.

People sometimes immediately think there is something nefarious going on when they hear such things. It isn’t mysterious, though. Retail service costs everywhere around the world are directly related to the cost of supplying the underlying infrastructure, and the U.S. market has among the highest overall costs

It really isn’t much more complicated than that.