As mentioned in other research many major Western European operators are adapting their offers to tiered or data-capped service plans instead of the all-you can eat/ unlimited data plans, both for mobile internet on smartphones as for mobile internet on notebook/ netbooks and tablets1. Recently all operators in the Netherlands have adjusted their tariffs for internet access on mobile phones. In this research brief we compare these operators' mobile offerings in the Netherlands with seven other Western European countries; being UK, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Austria and Germany. In order to try to compare like for like as much as possible we took an average user profile and selected two popular smartphones, calculating the total cost per contract period.
Main conclusions of this research brief are that there is a tremendous variation between the providers and countries, making a like for like comparison very complicated. It is however clear that customers with our average user profile are worst off at Proximus in Belgium, Telefonica O2 in Germany and Mobistar in Belgium with the highest total costs. Looking at the average total cost per county Belgium and Germany are the most expensive, followed by the Netherlands and Spain. As expected Austrian and Swedish operators offer far better deals at lower total cost prices. Looking into subsidies of mobile phones, operators in the Netherlands, Spain and UK provide the most subsidies, but these reductions seem to have a limited effect on the total cost that a customer has to pay.
