Free Press Rebuts USTelecom's Latest Flawed and Misleading Claims on Broadband Prices

Today’s USTelecom update is just more of the same grossly misleading and inaccurate analysis of broadband prices first seen in a prior report released last year. This new report, like the earlier versions, falsely asserts that the broadband prices internet users pay are declining. They are not, as can be seen from broadband providers’ statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as other survey data. USTelecom describes its misleading index as an actual price with a dollar figure, even though its methodology produces a result that is completely divorced from the actual prices people pay. USTelecom’s methodology is unnecessarily complex, and hides the reality anyone can learn from looking at ISPs’ annual reports. Those reports show companies’ average residential revenues per broadband customer — the average, actual price customers are charged — rising at more than twice the rate of inflation, with a sharp increase during the first quarter of 2021. For example, Comcast’s residential-broadband customers paid $53.71 per month on average in 2016 and $65.90 as of the first quarter of 2021. Charter’s residential-broadband customers paid $50.64 per month on average in 2016 and $61.97 per month as of the first quarter of 2021. Ignoring this reality, USTelecom’s analysis grossly manipulates FCC data on standalone non-promotional advertised rates, which are not the same as the price customers are actually charged. USTelecom further manipulates the FCC data it uses to construct this phony price index.