The cost of mobile data in Southeast Asia (INFOGRAPHIC)

Smartphones are getting cheaper by the day – but they’re not much more than dumb bricks unless we incessantly feed them with data packages. This can become expensive.

Across Southeast Asia, the cost of mobile data varies widely, as do the packet sizes and deals offered by respective carriers.

How affordable is 1 GB of data?

For this infographic, Tech in Asia compiled data from all Southeast Asian countries and calculated the typical price of 1GB (in US$) for each. This dedicated Wikia was a useful entry point to our research. We verified the availability of the data packages mentioned on each carrier’s website. Please note the packages we picked do not necessarily represent the cheapest available packages in each country. Costs vary per carrier, and some carriers also ask for different prices for the same package depending on location.

We also looked up the minimum wage for each country. Brunei, Cambodia, and Singapore are exceptions because they don’t have an official minimum wage. In these countries, we picked the typical wage of a low-income worker, such as in the garment or tourism industry. The most reliable source of information here were government websites. Many countries have different minimum wages per region, the area around the capital or main business hub usually offering the highest. For this infographic, we picked a minimum wage from the lower end of the spectrum.

Based on this, we calculated the estimated hours a worker has to put in to afford 1GB of data in their country. In some, it’s quite affordable. In others, not so.  There are a few surprises.

(Update on January 14: Some details about how we obtained the data were added to the text above. We were informed by representatives of Globe Telecom, a Philippine mobile carrier, that the company and rival Smart Communications have data packages cheaper then the one we originally included in this article. We’ve updated the information accordingly. Other countries with slight changes are Thailand and Malaysia. With the updated information, the affordability of mobile data in the Philippines now ranges in the middle. In the earlier version of the infographic, the Philippines stood out as one of the countries with particularly expensive data plans. The article was originally published December 30, 2015.)

Illustration by Tech in Asia’s Kathrinna Rakhmavika.