Going back to my comparison of current earth countries, does that still map? In 2013 in Afghanistan the cellphone plans were cheaper and service was faster (generally) than my US cellphone plan of the time, but Afghanistan isn't really thought
of as having a high tech level, in gaming terms.
Cell phones are a weird critter in this context; lots and lots of places went from ‘no telcom’ to cell phones everywhere because it’s vastly cheaper to roll out a cell phone network than an old school wired one; but they cannot *make* the network equipment,
they must import it. That fits in with the expected low TL. In the US, the price of cell phone service bears no real relationship to the costs of implementing it; our telcom pricing structure is still wrapped up in more than a century of monopoly and the huge
long tail of that infrastructure. Cell service is cheaper and faster almost everywhere else in the world than in the US….
The same with Antarctica from a different direction, the various labs set up there have a high tech level and the population (insofar as it counts as population) are skilled in that they can maintain technical equipment, but there's no infrastructure
to make cellphones all that useful, so far as I know.
Well, Antarctica is one of those prototype ‘High Tech pop 0 NI worlds’ scattered about, where the entire population is concentrated in a handful of or single facility, one that doesn’t actually make things.
Without thinking much about it, I would have guessed that Antarctica has a higher general tech level than Afghanistan, but only if you look at specific aspects of infrastructure.
It still comes down to “TL == what can be made, or is commonly and readily available at book retail prices there” not “What is in use there”.
Antarctica is effectively TL0, because *everything* must be imported, at significant cost.