Manipulated Facts, Manipulated Data and a Bias Due to the Corporate Thumb on the Scales of Justice; Garbage In-Harms to the Public Out.

How much garbage is being dumped from the Corporate Trucks that are filled with Corporate biased — read, made up statements that sound plausible but year after year have been spread with large amounts of hype, lobbying, press and talking heads?

Did you know that internet prices are going down, beating out inflation?

Overseas Wireless Prices: 100GB for about $8.65 a month.

The US Wireless Markets? Data Caps Applied, Made Up Junk Fees, No Serious Competition and Many Regulators have Been Captured, Compromised, Deceived Or Clueless.

This excerpt is from a recent report by Rewheel Research, a respected analysis and consulting firm that has consistently examined the price of wireless services. The research shows for first quarter 2024 that for 100GB, countries with competition from 4 or more primary wireless providers are offering services for about 8 Euros, with a price of about $.08-.09 cents per GB, and the larger packages for 1000GB can have te cost per GB at $.03-$.05 cents. (1 Euro is $1.08 dollars as of Nov. 1, 2024.) That makes the conversion of 8 Euros around $8.65 ).

Notice that the United States, all the way to the left, is almost the most expensive. We note that the report is being kind and does not include all of the taxes, fees and surcharges. And, we note that most of America is not being offered 100GB for 5G wireless, much less at around $10+ dollars.

Corporate Propaganda — Prices are Going Down, Really…

Corporate friendly AEI, claims that broadband prices have actually gone down according to two new reports.

“Broadband has been a bright spot in America’s grim inflationary landscape. While consumer prices rose 4.9 percent last year, the two recent reports show that consumer broadband prices fell, both in absolute terms and cost per gigabyte. But where many see a victory, some cities sense an opportunity. Stung by declining cable franchise fees, local governments are pushing to tax broadband. This effort faces severe regulatory headwinds, but if successful could erode consumer gains and drive broadband prices higher.” We’ll address the attack on the muni-broadband movement in an upcoming story.

Gains? One new study by the USTelecom, the front group-association for the phone companies, talks about ‘inflation’ and the price per GB. As we discuss, these use meaningless benchmarks and standards to convince us they are right.

And yet, US News and World Report claims that prices for internet have gone dramatically up since April, 2024.

Here’s How Much Internet Costs (Then and Now) in the Most Populous States in America [Survey Report] Oct. 21, 2024.

• “The average internet bill at sign-up among the most populous states was $81. That’s a bit higher than what we found in our April 2024 survey report, which showed the average initial internet bill nationwide was $77.
• “The average internet bill today among the most populous states is $98, which again is a slight increase over the average current internet bill nationwide of $89 identified in our April 2024 survey report.

Rising Internet Costs in New York

• “The average internet bill for New Yorkers at sign-up was $85.
• “The average internet bill for New Yorkers today is $99.

Rising Internet Costs in Pennsylvania

• The average internet bill for Pennsylvanians at sign-up was $83.
• The average internet bill for Pennsylvanians today is $110.

These are wireline ISP broadband services, not the wireless services, but what is clear is that the phone and cable companies will continually distort the storyline.

Of course, there is the rise in inflation, and the other standards like the Consumer Price Index, with comparisons to prices of service. But again, they are standard garbage for multiple reasons. At the core, none of these telco-cable analyses are valid because no one is examining the actual costs associated with offering the services. Prices should be in steep decline because of staff cuts that have been continuous or the write-offs and depreciation of the networks, lowering the value of the networks, Moreover, the diversion of the construction budgets to build out the fiber networks that were supposed to be dedicated to these wireline broadband networks. America has also been hit with the takeover of the billing so that the companies have made our communications bills into Christmas trees of hidden revenues to the companies.

In fact, the EU Commission broadband reports showed that the price for the broadband triple play — phone, broadband, internet and cable TV, is about $35–45 US dollars

The average costs for a triple play in the US was over $220 in 2019 according to Consumer Reports.

As we pointed out in a previous story, for the last decade there have been a pile-on of made-up fees, junk fees continuously added which has raised all of the bills, wireless and wireline, with no cost justification.

In examining the actual bills overseas, there are none of these junk fees, made up taxes, or the taxes that are passed through to the customers. As one letter from a senior couple, Americans, who are living in France, put it, these other fees are “gimmicks” to make the companies more profits

For example, the “cost recovery fees” on Verizon and AT&T wireless is now averaging $3.40 a month, which is not much per line, but it is on every connection. Thus, a 4 line family plan will pay 4 separate charges, and these are NOT mandated and are, in fact, classified as ‘revenues’ to the companies, unmarked as such.

And when you add all of other made-up taxes, fees and surcharges, it helps to make prices unjust and unreasonable and harms those who have trouble paying their bills.

AT&T and Verizon have over 230 million connections — which means this one line item, Cost recovery, is bringing almost $9 billion annually from this one made up fee.

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Next Up: Part II: Rate Regulation, Title II, State Telecommunications Public Utilities, Legacy Rules and One of the Largest Accounting Scandals in American History.

Verizon New York is a state telecommunications public utility, as is AT&T California. And this utility is part of Verizon’s Footprint, that’s right, the original Bell Local Exchange companies that were controlled mostly by the original AT&T were transferred in 1984 and instead of properly upgrading this state-based critical infrastructure — they let these networks deteriorate, but at the same time created a ‘second hidden network’, done through the manipulation of the accounting and deceiving the public and regulators.

The kicker is — the entire fiber optic deployments for FiOS as well as the Verizon wireless wires are all part of this state telecommunications public utility.

• These wires were put in classified as Title II, common carrier networks.
• This allowed Verizon to use the state utility construction budgets for wireless instead of fiber to the home,
• This allowed Verizon to claim that the original copper wires and the utility are legacy because they manipulated these financial accounting formulas.

And the failure of all of the telco-paid pundits, analysts, or the FCC and the other government agencies to examine these financial books and the cross subsidies or the state laws that allowed for the use of Title II for fiber optics — was never discussed.

Worse, the use of the utility construction budgets to pay for wireless, as well as fail to discuss how the ‘rates’ were illegally manipulated so that the wired customers were ‘harvested’ — i.e., continuous rate increases, happened in every state.

Of course all of these items are not only missing from the presentations; they directly contradict the ‘common wisdom’.

Many pundits, politicians and regulators have been claiming that the utility doesn’t exist, that it is just the copper wires or that the accounting wasn’t manipulated. And because of this utility-denial, they also never mention that the construction budgets were illegally transferred to wireless.

Whether through the buying into a rewritten history or as an intentional act. they are responsible for creating the Digital Divide, and they are the last people America should be listening to for what should happen next.

Here’s the next story teaser:

This is taken directly from the Verizon New Jersey FiOS cable TV franchise and it is virtually identical to the other FiOS franchises. Verizon New Jersey covers 96% of the state and it previously had commitments to have 100% of their franchise areas completed by 2010 with fiber to the home capable of at least 45 Mbps in both directions, starting in 1993. In fact, state laws were changed to charge wired customers extra to fund these build outs. Next, a decade later and voila — FiOS is a cable franchise that covers only a fraction of the original agreement, but at the core, the fiber optic wires have been put in as Title II common carrier networks and, as we have shown previously, the construction budgets were charged to ‘local intrastate’ service, the original copper wires of the state utility, and this was then, again, part of rate increases to fund these build outs, on top of the previous increases for networks that were never delivered, causing the Digital Divide.