Hard to Say What a Typical U.S. Internet Access Service Costs

With the caveat that the results are not generated by a statistically randomized poll, a survey conducted by cabletv.com suggests the difficulty of figuring out what consumers actually pay for internet access. 

The reason is bundles, which effectively obscure what consumers actually are paying, from the consumers themselves. So if asked, consumers buying bundles including internet access have to guess at what they are paying. 

For starters, cable operators have about 70 percent of the installed base of fixed network internet access accounts, so cable customer behavior is disproportionately important. Among cable operators, bundles including internet access range from a high of 73 percent to a low of 45 percent. 

source: cabletv.com. 

Effectively, that means nearly three quarters to half of cable internet access customers do not really know what they pay. So the self report data is, by definition, suspect. 

Third party efforts to estimate those payments generally have to rely on higher published stand-alone retail prices, which most cable customers are not paying. On the other hand, some estimates include promotional plan pricing, which also can skew the results. 

All that noted, the “average” U.S. price for internet access is about $50 a month. Using various methods of comparing global prices, though, U.S. prices seem to be right at the global average, paradoxical though that may seem. “Average” is always a statistical matter for anything related to the internet, and that holds true for consumer access prices as well. 

One has to adjust for currency effects, different costs of living  in various countries, choose which plans to compare, adjust for promotions and discounts as well as speed differentials, for example. 

If “average”  purchased speeds are 150 Mbps in one country, but 10 Mbps in another, what does the “same effective price” mean? Is price per megabit-per-second a better metric? And how does one average asymmetrical buying patterns where significant percentages of customers buy service at speeds above 300 Mbps and also at 25 Mbps?

Using the purchasing power parity method of normalizing prices across countries, U.S. fixed network internet access is cheaper than the global average of $73 a month. So average U.S. prices are significantly lower than the global average.