Originally Posted by
mikesyr18
I think the size of this country plays a role in that. There's a lot of land mass to cover, including raised elevations. You then have a higher population so increased bandwidth is necessarry. You also have to remember the government plays a hand in your higher prices as well with their taxes and fees.
Right now I'm paying $50 a month for unlimited talk, text, and 15GB of data on Verizon.
I remember buying a SIM card from Vodafone Australia upon arrival back in 2014 and realizing that the per-GB price was something like $5/GB (vs. the $10/GB that was standard in the US at the time). Australia is a fairly big land mass, mind you.
That said, this is probably a topic for another thread.
Originally Posted by
mikesyr18
In the article I cited on my last post
Not sure an opinion piece is a good indication of the actual effects of Durbin. The CRS, on the other hand, has
this to say about a proposed bill to repeal Durbin:
Debit card issuers covered by Regulation II had expected to lose interchange fee income under the regulated cap, but the evidence has been uneven particularly for those institutions that process large volumes of debit card operations. Some covered institutions initially experienced declines in debit interchange revenues shortly after rule implementation, but they have since seen some gradual increase over time, which is consistent with the reported growth of debit card transactions since 2009. By contrast, some covered institutions saw an initial increase in interchange revenues but have since seen some gradual decline over time. Generally speaking, the amount of interchange revenue also reflects the amount of transactions, which depends upon economic activity. In other words, lower revenues that would have been anticipated in light of the interchange fee cap may have been offset by a rise in the quantity of debit transactions as the economy continued its recovery from the 2007-2009 recession. Hence, comparisons of the interchange revenues pre- and post-implementation of Regulation II are challenging because both the interchange fees and debit transactions likely changed simultaneously over the period.
In fact, rewards programs themselves might have changed rather than gone away:
When customers use a variety of financial products and services, depository institutions may cross-subsidize their costs and financial risks more effectively. Hence, some financial institutions entered into partnerships with merchants sponsoring customer reward programs to help facilitate the attraction of deposits. Customers receive rewards for shopping with a particular merchant and paying for their purchases using electronic payment cards (i.e., credit, debit, or prepayment card) associated with participating banks.