Thanks Allison, and, still curious about researched explanations on the “why” of this article’s information. Re some other responses, and my own experience & observations:

Smartphones themselves are cheaper, sure, on the low end. But the cost of plans to actually use them has not gone down in recent years, and does not depend on the cost of the phone. Same price for same plan, whether it’s a $79 phone or a $799 phone. Data is always capped, one way or another, on a mobile account. And the cost over the cap is quite high per unit of data.

On the other hand a home internet connection is generally unlimited (in any practical terms) for the monthly price. Also more reliable and stable on average.

Meanwhile, the cost of a home connection has also not gone down in recent years, and in fact has gone up. In a lot of places there are only two available carriers; in some places there is a functional monopoly (only one carrier, or two “brands” that are owned by the same parent somewhere up the corporate food chain). So competition is limited or non-existent and prices can be raised with no recourse for the subscriber.

For the youngsters here — a cable or DSL high-speed home internet connection bottomed out at around $20/month, no “bundling” required. That’s half or less what it is in recent years, anywhere I’ve lived. Of course that was long ago now, in internet time. But there were less people online. Standard economic theories would suggest that with increasing volumes of consumers, prices should go down. Instead they’ve gone up (which applies to mobile plans as well as home internet).

Stepping back to a larger view, what it looks like to me is that the pushers are jacking up the price of a fix, now that the addicts are thoroughly hooked. The pushers are also consolidating to a very few, and very large and powerful, mobs. Soon they’ll be in the “too big to fail” category, or perhaps the “too big to regulate” category in this case.

So as some have already pointed out, it’s default culture economics. Pricing for these services is designed to maximize profit to the providers. They have no interest in, and no motivation for, making them “affordable” to the poorer among us.

The math is “how much can we charge, without losing business we don’t want to or can’t afford to lose?” That price is always going to be somewhere above “affordable” for the poorer among us, because we are not the primary customer base. People with more money are, and pricing is based on what they are willing to pay.