Hard to Tell What a "Typical" Consumer Pays for Home Broadband

It remains as hard as ever to figure out what the “average” or “typical” U.S. customer actually pays for home broadband service. Analysis has to be done on posted retail prices for stand-alone service, without taking into account bundle discounts, promotional pricing and then all the “extras” such as modem rental that often are involved.

And in the U.S. market, bundling is quite significant, indeed.



That noted, if one just analyzes the posted, stand-alone prices for home broadband, one might say these are typical ranges. Anecdotally, one might guess that the bundle price for any home broadband service can easily be 40 percent to 50 percent lower than the stand-alone retail price.

The point is that up to half of households do not pay those “stand-alone” rates because they buy a bundle of some sort that lowers the actual cost. So, roughly speaking, blended prices might be about 75 percent of the stand-alone rates, including both bundle discounts and accounts buying stand-alone internet access.