November 19, 2025
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Lower Bills, Faster Speeds: Family Budgets Get a Boost as Broadband Prices Decline
By Arthur Menko, Business Planning, Inc.
Key Findings
- Real Prices for Most Popular Broadband Services Drop 8.7% in 2025
- Real Prices for Faster Gigabit Service Also Down 6.2%
- Since 2015, Broadband Prices ⬇️ 43%, Overall Consumer Prices ⬆️35.8%
- Faster Speeds + Price Drops = Soaring Consumer Value Amid Near-Record Broadband Investment, Intense Competition
Executive Summary
In a period where every dollar counts for most Americans, consumer broadband services are delivering another year of declining prices and faster speeds.
This sixth edition of USTelecom’s Broadband Pricing Index (BPI) shows U.S. broadband services have continued a long-running trend of pairing faster speeds with lower bills. These price declines stand in sharp contrast to overall U.S. inflation (CPI-U), which stood at 2.4% from March 2024 to March 2025.
The continued progress of broadband affordability and quality over the past year adds to a 10-year record of soaring consumer value. Indeed, broadband prices for today’s most popular services (100-940 Mbps) have declined by 43.1% over the past 10 years, while the cost of overall consumer goods and services has risen by 35.8%.
As network investment and fiber deployment continue at near-record levels – $89.6 billion last year alone – U.S. consumers have the powerful dual advantage of some of the world’s most advanced and increasingly affordable high-speed connections. This connectivity is foundational so that more Americans can participate in our modern digital economy – from accessing medical specialists, remote work and educational opportunities to realizing the promise of AI and quantum networks.
When the USTelecom Broadband Pricing Index launched in 2020, it tracked pricing for broadband tiers that aligned with the FCC’s then broadband benchmark of 25/3 Mbps. Today, thanks to the forward march of technology and investment, a majority of U.S. households (55.9%) now choose plans between 100 Mbps and 940 Mbps (BPI-Speed) and more than a quarter (27%) opt for even faster service at the 1 Gbps tier (BPI-Gigabit).
The fact that near-record private capital investment continues to flow, while many consumers experience lower bills and faster service, is a powerful demonstration of the intensely competitive broadband marketplace. This bodes well for consumer purchasing power, more widespread adoption of affordable broadband-and America’s continued leadership of the global information economy at the dawn of the AI era.