The latest broadband pricing report released by USTelecom | The Broadband Association (USTelecom) tells a familiar – and welcome – tale of falling prices and rising speeds.
Released on Tuesday and, as in previous years, prepared by Business Planning, Inc.'s Arthur Menko, "2026 Broadband Pricing Index: Faster Speeds, Lower Prices" (2026 BPI) analyzes data from 2025. It concludes that real (that is, adjusted for inflation) prices fell as speeds continued to climb. Specifically:
- PRICE: For the most-popular offerings (those delivering download speeds between 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) and 940 Mbps), the 2026 BPI reports that real prices dropped by 6 percent. The price of so-called "entry-level" plans – which provide download speeds between 100 and 249 Mbps and which USTelecom characterizes as "the most accessible tier for price-sensitive households" – reportedly decreased by an even greater margin: over 17 percent. According to the 2026 BPI, the price of gigabit (1,000 Mbps or greater download speeds) services fell nearly 5 percent.
- SPEED: The 2026 BPI concludes that subscribers to the most-popular offerings in 2025 saw speeds increase by nearly 22 percent – and since 2014, those speeds have increased by 145 percent.
Americans appear to recognize that the broadband value proposition hasn't merely improved but stands as a welcome outlier in comparison to other household expenses. According to a March 2026 survey of 1,500 likely voters conducted by Impact Research and cited in the 2026 BPI, only 2 percent of respondents identified the price of home Internet service as a top two cost concern, rendering it the least pressing of all surveyed categories, which included groceries, health insurance, housing, gasoline, and prescription drugs, among others.
It is important to note, of course, that none of this happens by accident. Thanks to the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in private capital each year – according to an October 2025 USTelecom investment report, nearly $90 billion in 2024 and over $2.2 trillion total since 1996 – fierce competition among a diverse set of facilities-based providers increasingly delivers better service at lower cost.
In a companion blog post, USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter summarized the report in plain terms – "broadband internet service continues to deliver more value for less money" – and urged policymakers to ensure that those trends continue. Specifically, he identified copper retirement and permitting reform as two areas ripe for further deregulatory action.
As it happens, in comments filed yesterday regarding the Commission's next report on the state of competition in the communications marketplace, FSF President Randolph May and I made the same two points. We also identified the pole attachment "accelerated docket" and the spectrum pipeline as areas where the FCC can take steps to accelerate broadband investment and deployment.
Free State Foundation scholars have summarized every BPI report released by USTelecom. Posts to the FSF Blog addressing previous versions are available here: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020.
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