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The Hidden Reason Your Phone Bill Is So High
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The Ant War Outside San Diego
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Carl Jung and Dreams
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

On May 14, 2012, a new Israeli phone company opened its launch press conference with a slogan aimed at the whole country: "Stop being suckers." Golan Telecom was offering unlimited calls and texts, plus data, for 99 shekels a month. Its founder called his prices "the new standard to which everyone will have to lower their prices." Within weeks, they did. A gigabyte of data does the same job everywhere, but its price does not. The British comparison site Cable.co.uk looked at 5,603 mobile plans across 237 countries in 2023. The cheapest data on Earth was in Israel, where a gigabyte cost an average of two cents. Italy came second at about nine cents. In the United States the same gigabyte averaged $6, roughly 300 times the Israeli price, which ranked America 219th out of 237. At the top of the scale, Zimbabwe charged $43.75.

In the cheapest countries, rival carriers fight for every customer, and they fight with price. Israel is the textbook case. Around 2012 its government opened the market to new carriers and let them rent space on existing networks instead of building their own. In Italy, the French discount carrier Iliad arrived in 2018 offering 30 gigabytes for about $7 a month, and a price war followed there too. Both price wars had the same man behind them. Xavier Niel, the French telecom tycoon who founded Iliad, was also a co-owner of Golan Telecom. India went further. In 2016 Reliance Jio launched by giving away its 4G data free for nearly four months. Its chairman, Mukesh Ambani, promised "the lowest data rates anywhere in the world." Today a gigabyte in India costs about 16 cents.

Expensive countries tend to be dominated by two or three large carriers, and none of them has much reason to undercut the others. Carriers must also buy spectrum, the slices of the airwaves that carry their signals, from governments at auction. In some countries those auctions raise tens of billions of dollars, and customers pay it back through their bills. Covering a crowded country like Italy is cheap per person. Covering the empty stretches of the American West, or a remote island, costs far more. That is why the Falkland Islands and Saint Helena, a speck in the South Atlantic with about 4,400 people, both pay more than $40 a gigabyte. As for Golan Telecom, in 2020 it was bought for about $161 million by Cellcom, one of the big carriers it had launched to undercut. The cheap data stayed. For the price of one gigabyte in Zimbabwe, an Israeli can still buy more than 2,000.

Along a front line that winds through the suburbs and canyons north of San Diego, a war has been running for at least two decades. The soldiers are about 2.5 millimeters long. Both armies belong to the same species, the Argentine ant, Linepithema humile. It first turned up in the United States in New Orleans around 1891, most likely as a stowaway on cargo ships from South America. By about 1905 it had reached California. Today it lives on six continents, and the IUCN ranks it among the 100 worst invasive species in the world, warning that in Hawaii it threatens the survival of several native arthropods. It has managed all of this without being able to sting or bite a human.

In Argentina these ants live in ordinary colonies that fight their neighbors. The ants that spread around the world came from small, genetically narrow groups, so they ended up smelling almost alike. Ants tell friend from foe by scent. Nests that would normally fight treated each other as family instead, and they merged into vast networks called supercolonies. The biggest, known as the Very Large Colony, runs roughly 600 miles along the California coast. Southern California has at least four smaller supercolonies as well, and the big one borders three of them. In 2002, a team led by Tatiana Giraud described a European supercolony stretching about 3,700 miles, from Italy to the Atlantic coast of Spain. In 2009, Japanese researchers led by Eiriki Sunamura put ants from California, Europe and Japan together. They did not fight. In effect, they belong to one colony spread across three continents.

San Diego is one of the places where two separately founded supercolonies meet. Near Escondido, the Very Large Colony runs into the smaller Lake Hodges Colony. Their scents don't match, so wherever they touch, they fight. Workers grapple, bite and spray chemicals until one of them dies. In 2004, researcher Melissa Thomas collected the dead along parts of the border every week for six months. She estimated that at least 15 million ants were killed in that time, a pace of roughly 30 million a year. It was the first hard field count of what happens when these supercolonies collide. Yet the border barely moved, because colonies this size replace their losses easily. "You'd drive up and, before getting out of the car, you'd see the piles of dead ants," the UC San Diego ecologist David Holway, who led the research, told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2006. They had died over a difference in smell too faint for any human to detect.