What Does 100 Mbps Cost?

Here's an example of what Internet access costs in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Policy advocates will tend to point to such examples to argue that municipalities should be allowed to compete directly with private Internet service providers. Commercial providers will tend to say government should not compete with private firms when a market for services clearly exists.

Whatever you think of the policy issues, there is something else equally important. It is one thing to argue that, as a matter of policy, everyone should be able to buy access, at affordable rates, it is quite another to get agreement on what "access" or "affordable" means.

"Reasonable cost" is at least in part a simple matter of price transparency. In a triple play, the actual "cost" of a component is an accounting exercise. Still, what is "reasonable" changes over time. At any given point in time, however, there typically is a gap between the pricing of consumer services and business services, at least in part because the business services are offered with quality of service assurances and a higher level of service overall.

But it wouldn't be unusual for price differences between a business class service and a consumer class service to amount to an order of magnitude. Even a municipal provider might have to maintain those sorts of price relationships.

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