AT&T/Verizon lobby keeps claiming that home-Internet prices are dropping

US government data shows that home-Internet customers pay more each year and that average broadband expenditures are rising faster than inflation, but cable and telecom lobbies keep claiming that broadband prices are getting lower. The latest example came  from USTelecom—which represents AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink/Lumen, Frontier, and other DSL and fiber Internet providers. The group unveiled the latest version of its Broadband Pricing Index [BPI] that measures prices for residential Internet service. But instead of measuring the average or median price that all home-Internet customers pay, the group reports the prices of a couple service tiers that it claims are representative of American consumers at large. USTelecom claims that the most popular broadband tier's price has dropped 26.2 percent since 2015 and that the highest-speed offering's price dropped 39.2 percent. But figuring out exactly what USTelecom is measuring when it says the "most popular" and "highest-speed" service tiers have dropped in price is a little tricky.