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.
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