FCC Claims Prices for Broadband and Wireless Went Down. Garbage in Equals How to Manipulate Public Policies.
This is PART 2;
CLICK FOR: PART I: Welcome to the Questions Nobody Wants to Talk About. New Series — The New and Improved 2025 Plan for Our Digital Future — 2025 Is Our Year — Not Theirs.
Prices went down… Really.
This is a partial list of the price increases by AT&T on all services from 2021–2025 and it shows no lower prices, it shows that there is no competition for if there was AT&T would not be able to have continuous increases on all services. And it was generated and assisted by Google AI.
The FCC quotes only corporate funded and biased data and analyses to help make corporate-public policies seem acceptable. Worse, this data and analysis can be based on government supplied data that is bordering on deceptive, and we have been on record that it is in need of fixing since the 1990’s.
Example 1: Did you know ‘real’ prices for broadband and wireless have been going down for years?
According to newly appointed FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, in his 2024 Net Neutrality ‘dissenting view’, he wrote:
“In real terms, the prices for Internet services have dropped by about 9% since the beginning of 2018, according to BLS CPI data. On the mobile broadband side alone, real prices have dropped by roughly 18% since 2017, according to BLS and industry data. And for the most popular broadband speed tiers, real prices are down 54%, and for the fastest broadband speed tiers, prices are down 55%, over the past 8 years, according to BLS and industry data.”
To summarize as bullet points, “in real terms, the prices for”
- Internet services dropped by about 9% since the beginning of 2018,
- Mobile broadband prices have dropped by roughly 18% since 2017,
- Most popular broadband speed tiers, prices are down 54%,
- Fastest broadband speed tiers, prices are down 55%, over the past 8 years,
“Real prices”! Did you know you are not paying ‘Real Prices’?
Definition of “Real Prices”: From this point forward: Real prices are the prices that appear on your bills and you pay them. It is not the use of imaginary numbers or those, including government agencies or ‘experts’, who actually do not use actual bills in their analysis.
Let’s look at 3 different real prices for services.
A) Massive list of price increases of AT&T’s products and services. We asked Google AI to list the AT&T price increases from 2021 through 2025. The opening presents a partial list.
Where are the decreasing and lowering of rates? This shows multiple increases for internet plans, specific wireless plans, especially older plans, fiber optic increases and even Firstnet internet increase.
The BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics “Consumer Price Index” gives incorrect results.
We asked multiple AI programs a basic question: (November 15th, 2024)
QUESTION: Does the BLS CPI data collect actual telephone bills via surveys?
ANSWER: “No, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not collect actual telephone bills via surveys to calculate the Consumer Price Index (CPI)”:
“Data collection The BLS collects price information for the CPI by visiting or calling thousands of businesses, service establishments, and rental units. Some prices are collected directly from websites or apps.”
In short, the FCC data has been and continues to be unreliable at best and has nothing to do with the actual costs to offer the service or what customers are actually paying because it leaves out a library of charges, taxes on taxes, made up charges — and all of the customer bills where there are added services the customer did not order.
Going to the BLS site we corroborate the BLS telecommunications is not based on bills or surveys but on web sites of the retail outlets.
“Change and Quality Adjustment
For the telecommunications services categories, the CPI returns every month to the sampled outlets or their websites to obtain the current prices of the selected items, including any changes or promotional offerings. Any characteristics of the selected items that have changed are also identified and reviewed.”
NOTE: The IRREGULATORS (and our previous incarnations, Teletruth and New Networks Institute), have a telecom auditing group, LTC Consulting, as part of the team and we have taken 4 successfully completed class actions, and LTC’s telecom auditing work yielded over $50 million in customer refunds.
We address the problems with these statistics in another story, but the details are:
§ It is impossible to calculate the taxes, fees and surcharges on these bills,
§ There are made up junk fees, or worse.
§ “Cramming”, or “ramming”, i.e.; being charged for a service that you did not order, “Ramming” is when the charge is placed from a subsidiary of the same company> These are commonplace but never show up as part of the government or ‘corporate funded analyses.
§ Web pages, as we show in other stories, never publish the actual charges a customer pays, so this can add 20–40% more on the bill
Mathematical Manipulations: There are analyses, such as those that claim they are tracking and are claiming that they follow the rate of inflation, and there are others that will say — the cell service added x speed and or x more gigs, and thus the prices based on what you get or the inflation rate is part of these make believe, imaginary numbers.
These caveats are not ‘the price someone pays’ but the value of what you are getting for your money. But all of these leave out the flip-side; the price of broadband should have been in steep decline as the networks are being written off and the staff has been cut — but these aspects are missing
Missing are also, then, the rate increases and what they were based on originally and were those obligations ever met? And where in these equations are the role of the customer as the primary investor, the funding source to do these constructions or worse, in most states, the capx budgets transferred to the other subsidiaries so that the customer never received what they paid for and what was supposed to be done, such as bringing fiber optic infrastructure to rural areas, for example.
EXAMPLE 2: The state utilities have been ‘harvesting’ customers.
Not one FCC docket or proceeding has ever seriously addressed “harvesting”, or any other serious billing issue, such as ‘ramming’.
This California Public Utility Commission report detailed the massive continuous rate increases imposed on wireline customers. This happened in virtually every state to varying degrees.
From: “AT&T CORPORATE AND CALIFORNIA FINANCIALS AND ILEC INVESTMENT POLICIES: PHASE 2 UPDATE”
- 153% rate increases. “AT&T California has raised its rates for legacy flat-rate residential service by 152.6% since the service was de-tariffed by the CPUC in 2009.”.
- ”This succession of rate increases is consistent with and in support of a “harvesting” strategy aimed at maximizing revenues from existing customers until they ultimately discontinue their service.
- “AT&T senior management’s interest in and attention to its legacy wireline ILEC Operations has been subordinated to its wireless operations
AT&T’s strategy has been to practice this in all of its 21 states and has continuously raised rates. AT&T CA prices went up 150 % or more and this activity, is the dismantling of th telecommunications infrastructure but using it, not for upgrades of the state utility bur for the other services like wireless.
These 2 examples of (at?) clearly shows rates are increasing not decreasing.
And the BLS CPI has been in need of repair as it can’t supply basic info about the wireless or broadband markets.
Next up: The 3rd example of bad data and analysis shows how the prices overseas are a fraction of what we pay in America. — and so it isn’t just that the FCC continually quotes the corporate greek-chorus, but it also shows a failure of the FCC and regulators to investigate how overseas a wireless 5G broadband service can cost $20 dollars and have 350Gigs, as opposed to $80-$90 dollars and it is then capped at 20 gigs or 50 usually at the high end.
But it is the fact that this overseas wireless service cost $.06 cents a Gig where, especially at the low end of the users in America, the average cost of 1 Gig can be $3-$15 per Gig.
And coming up:
- Part III: Why Are Overseas Communications Prices, from Wireless to Broadband, a Fraction of what We Are Charged in America?
- How much did AT&T, Charter-Spectrum et al get in government subsidies over the last few years?
