How to Lower Your Monthly Broadband Costs
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Here's your Money Briefing for Tuesday, July 27th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. For a lot of families, broadband Internet service is a basic necessity. It allows us to work from home, pay the bills online, even order groceries, not to mention checking out movies on streaming services. But escalating monthly costs of Internet service are tearing a hole in household budgets.
these companies bank on customers setting and forgetting payment for their bills and never really thinking to scrutinize them until there's a sudden price hike and you may be paying, you know, double or triple what you initially signed up for.
So what can consumers do to lower their monthly bill? Turns out a lot. We'll ask WSJ personal technology columnist Nicole Nguyen about that after the break.
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How are rising broadband costs affecting household budgets?
A recent study by the new America's Open Technology Institute found that Americans pay more on average for broadband than many parts of Europe and Asia. When you add in all the other costs that have shot up recently, it's putting a lot of pressure on household budgets. But there are ways Americans can dial back some of those broadband charges. WSJ personal technology columnist Nicole Wynn looked into what's driving costs higher and steps you can take to lower your monthly bill. Hi, Nicole. Thanks for being with us. Hi. So, you know, Nicole, families have made sacrifices here or there during the pandemic, but broadband service is not something a lot of people can do without.
Absolutely. Internet is essential. The pandemic proved that learning and working from home requires having a high speed and stable internet connection. And the effect that monopoly or oligopoly, even if it's regional, has on consumers is that price becomes a barrier to entry. And a Wall Street Journal analysis actually found that low-income and rural areas get worse deals than their high-income and urban counterparts, if only because they're not incentivized to invest in infrastructure in those areas, and there's lack of competition there.
Now, a lot of broadband customers have seen their monthly bills increase for essentially the same level of service. So what's behind these rising costs?
A lot of the researchers in this space point to effectively a lack of competition and the continued consolidation of a lot of telecom companies, most recently T-Mobile and Sprint, but that's also happening in the broadband space. And although there are a handful of major nationwide internet providers and also regional providers, they've essentially carved up the country in ways that give them, if not a monopoly, an oligopoly. An oligopoly is a state of limited competition. in which a market is shared by a small number of providers, which is what most Americans face today. They usually have a choice between one or two cable providers.
Now you've heard from people who sort of shudder when they open their monthly bill. Well, what have they told you?
A lot of folks that I've spoken to for this column were blindsided by sudden price hikes.
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