There They Go Again

USTelecom has a press release about the same time every year that claims that broadband prices are dropping. The claim this year is that the ‘real price’ for the most popular broadband services dropped 8.7 percent in 2025 and that the price for gigabit service dropped 6.2 percent. USTelecom claims that broadband prices have dropped 43 percent since 2015, while the price for everything else, using the Overall Consumer Price Index, rose 35.8 percent in the same time period. Anybody who pays a broadband bill and who still uses the same internet service provider as the year before knows they have not seen a price reduction. If a consumer was paying $80 a year ago, according to USTelecom, their bill should have dropped $6.96 per month. As usual, USTelecom is playing on words, and the key word in their claim is “real prices”. USTelecom is saying that the cost per megabit of broadband has dropped this year. How can the megabit price drop when the actual prices have increased? It’s simple math—ISPs continue to increase the maximum broadband speeds of their products. For example, in the last year, the download speed on the basic broadband product from Charter was increased from 300 Mbps to 500 Mbps. No consumer thinks about their broadband bill as a cost per megabit, but USTelecom is making its claim based on that.