Specifically where does the mobile data originate from? Is it created, does it cost suppliers to “make” it, and do cell/mobile phone networks purchase it from elsewhere
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You’re paying for the use of their very expensive, nationwide, high-speed wireless networking connectivity.
Phone calls take almost no bandwidth (9600 bits per second would produce an acceptable call, and has for nearly 80 years!). Data takes up tons of bandwidth.
You want to send and receive tons of data to and from the global Internet, and that costs money. There are fibres, there are redundant routes, there are all kinds of switching equipment, there are radio equipment, there are radio licences, etc. and you have to share it with several million other customers who also want to use it – everything from smart meters for electricity companies to backhaul for live outside TV broadcasts, all kinds of users.
You’re paying for them to provide you that link – and the more you want, the faster you want it, and the more reliable you want it to be, the more it costs them to provide it.
In actual fact, it’s the calls and the text messages that are the con. They are such a pitiful amount of data nowadays that they should basically be free for everyone. If you paid “per megabyte” for calls and texts, you’d basically use a couple of megabytes a month, even if you were a heavy caller. Instead I pay, say, £18 a month and I can get unlimited amounts of data at 5G speeds (500Mbps+).
Mobile phone networks operate the masts, which they have to pay to keep running and upgrade regularly. Those require radio licences to operate legally, which they have to pay for. The masts need to be connected to the global internet, which means expensive “leased lines” to every mast in the country (almost, some rural ones will do things differently)… those kinds of lines can be £10,000-£100,000 or more a year to have.
And then those companies often also have to provide some kind of backup if that goes wrong (things like 4G are sold to emergency services, so many urban masts need even more connections to ensure they stay up in an emergency).
The costs are nothing to do with the data itself. The costs are to do with basically running a giant computer network connected to a giant “wifi” network (if you like) that you can literally send/receive faster than your home broadband on, and then connecting all that to the Internet.
Mobile providers are basically 99% Internet Service Providers now, and about 1% “telephone” companies. All your calls and all their internal voice traffic is basically just going “over IP” (which means, over Internet Protocol). It’s all just Internet data. Your call is Internet data, and it needs to be on the Internet to work, and your phone connects to the Internet over the radio waves using 4G/5G/etc.
That’s why “Wifi Calling” is now a thing. Your phone just switches to sending your call over your own Wifi to the Internet, same way that it would normally send it over the phone company masts to the Internet normally.
You’re paying for someone to provide, maintain, upgrade and keep an Internet connection service running for you, and to do so over the public airwaves in a way that you can literally rely on it for emergency purposes (e.g. police equipment, etc.), commercial purposes (e.g. energy meters in homes, traffic lights, etc.) as well as you calling your mates on the phone.
The difference in operating cost between a connection that’s idle and one that’s saturated is negligible compared to what consumers get charged for data. The only real justification is to reduce peak demand, because that will let you serve more customers with less spectrum and infrastructure.
In some cases you might get different pricing depending on on-peak vs off-peak hours, but more often pricing is based on what the company thinks you’re willing to pay than on any underlying scarcity.
tl;dr: It’s a cash grab.
Think of “Mobile data” as a pipe.
You are paying for the size of the pipe and the amount of water sent down that pipe.
The “water” comes from the suppliers (youtube, web sites, etc.) and whatever “water” you send down the pipe from your device (pics, messages, email)
Mobile data costs consumers because an ISP (or cell provider in the case of cellular data) have to provide a means of you receiving that data. Anything you do on your devices that isn’t making a phone call on your phone is using mobile data. Data is both sent and received. If you type an email and hit “Send”, you are the creator of that mobile data which gets sent from your device to wherever you are sending it. If you are watching YouTube, every pixel of the videos you are watching is data being sent to your device.
So as for the who generates it, it really depends on what you are doing. It could be you generating it, as was the case when you made this post. It could be the application or site where you are getting that data from, or it could be that application or site is hosting data from someone else who uploaded it.
But back to the question in the title, you are paying for access to send/receive data. There are over 100000 miles of network cables just within the continental US. Add in the whole world and it is over a million miles of cable. Laying and maintaining that cable costs money. So you are paying your ISP both for that cable they have laid to make your internet access possible: the equipment you are using (cable/DSL modem), the wire they laid, technicians and network engineers to build and maintain that infrastructure, etc. For your phone, it’s the same thing, but instead of only using cable, they are also using massive cell towers they had to build all over the place to make sure you have cellular signal.
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