By B.N. Frank
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is supposed to protect Americans from the telecom and cable industries. The agency has instead catered to these industries for decades (see 1, 2, 3). Various lawsuits have been filed against it because of this (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).
Big Cable and Big Telecom overcharging Americans for internet services many still don’t have has become embarrassingly obvious (see 1, 2). Industry lobby groups still get paid to keep trying to convince everyone otherwise.
From Ars Technica:
AT&T/Verizon lobby keeps claiming that home-Internet prices are dropping
USTelecom’s “Broadband Pricing Index” doesn’t measure what the average user pays.
US government data shows that home-Internet customers pay more each year and that average broadband expenditures are rising faster than inflation, but cable and telecom lobbies keep claiming that broadband prices are getting lower.
The latest example came Wednesday from USTelecom, which represents AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink/Lumen, Frontier, and other DSL and fiber Internet providers. In a post titled “No Fluke: American Broadband Prices Continue Decline in 2021,” the group unveiled the latest version of its Broadband Pricing Index [BPI] that measures prices for residential Internet service.
But instead of measuring the average or median price that all home-Internet customers pay, the group reports the prices of a couple service tiers that it claims are representative of American consumers at large.
“This second installment of the BPI reveals continued and substantial price reductions for the most popular and highest-speed broadband Internet services,” USTelecom wrote. “These price declines coincide with an unprecedented increase in pandemic related broadband demand and an increase in the overall cost of consumer goods.”
The group said the “price of the most popular tier of broadband service has declined by 7.5 percent” from 2020 to 2021 and that the “price for the highest-speed broadband service offering declined by 2.3 percent.” USTelecom also says the most popular broadband tier’s price has dropped 26.2 percent since 2015 and that the highest-speed offering’s price dropped 39.2 percent in that six-year stretch. But USTelecom’s measurement of the “highest-speed” plan uses a value of 248Mbps in 2021, even though the group’s members routinely offer speeds four times as fast over fiber networks.
“Price per megabit” dropped
Separately, cable lobby group NCTA asserts that broadband prices have dropped 98 percent since 2000—but that’s only when measuring the “price per megabit” and ignoring that the “fast” Internet speeds of 512kbps in the year 2000 would provide an awful Internet experience in the year 2021. It also ignores that people in some rural areas still have to use DSL service with speeds of less than a megabit while paying nearly as much as people with modern connections. In these areas where the telecom industry has failed to upgrade old networks, the companies have not slashed the price per megabit.
The lobby groups have struggled to convince anyone outside their industry that broadband prices are going down. Americans know that they are paying more because they can read their bills, which are often much higher than the advertised rates because of hidden fees.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that the average Internet subscriber’s monthly expenditures rose 14 percent between 2016 and 2019, from $55.82 to $63.66.
White House doesn’t believe ISPs
Activist Post reports regularly about the FCC, Big Cable and Big Telecom. For more information visit our archives.
Image: Pixabay
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