Collecting and building a reliable and up to date price database that captures the real costs of data products is a significant component of policy formulation, as prices are a crucial component in assessing affordability and benchmarking exercises, Cable recently publicised their worldwide mobile data prices for a 1GB data package. Cable collected the lowest and highest prices for a 1GB and used
the average price to rank countries. Apart from the average estimate not reflecting the actual costs paid by mobile data users, Cable did not consider the price differentials between small and large data packages. An assessment of headline prices has shown that operator headline retail price has shown that consumers of small packages pay more on a per GB basis than those who consume large data packages.
