Five years of inflation taught American households to brace before opening a bill, but wireless is the one bill that bucked the trend. CTIA's Wireless Industry Indices report, built on the annual industry survey released September 10, 2026, puts the 2025 numbers on the record, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms them with price, wage and spending data that owe the industry nothing. By the gigabyte, the minutes of work or the part of the household budget, wireless service in 2025 sat at or near its most affordable point on record.
The average connection, postpaid and prepaid together, brought the industry $33.14 a month in service revenue in 2025, a third less than the $49.26 it brought in 2007, the year the iPhone launched. Consumer prices rose 55% over those 18 years, so the 2007 bill comes to $76.49 in 2025 dollars, and the real price of the average connection fell 57%. The obvious objection is mix: of the 599 million connections CTIA counted at the end of 2025, 46% aren't phones, and a smartwatch or tablet line bills a fraction of a smartphone. But the carriers' own phone numbers settle the question. AT&T; reported postpaid phone ARPU of $56.57 in the fourth quarter of 2025, 1.9% above its $55.52 six years earlier, and T-Mobile's rose 10.7% to $50.71. Consumer prices rose 26% over the same six years, so the postpaid phone line got 19% cheaper in real terms at AT&T; and 12% cheaper at T-Mobile, with no tablets or watches in the denominator.
The bill understates how much cheaper the service got, because customers kept buying more of it. Service revenue divided by traffic went from $412 per gigabyte in 2010 to $4.50 per gigabyte in 2020 and $1.48 per gigabyte in 2025. The massive success of fixed wireless home Internet flatters the last five years of that series, so the analysis also looks at smartphones alone. CTIA puts the average smartphone at 22.1GB a month in 2025, up from 9.2GB in 2019 and about 176MB in 2010. Divide AT&T;'s postpaid phone ARPU by that usage and a phone gigabyte cost about $6.03 in 2019 and $2.56 in 2025; at T-Mobile it fell from $4.98 to $2.29. Price the 22.1GB at 2015's industry rate of $19.89 a gigabyte and the monthly phone bill would be $440; AT&T; billed $56.57.
How does an industry cut its price for 18 years and still grow? It sells more connections, and over the last five years it added home broadband to the list. Industry service revenue rose 69% between 2007 and 2025 to $235 billion, and the average number of connections rose 151%. Traffic reached 159.3 trillion megabytes in 2025, 410 times the 2010 volume, and smartphones carried roughly 83 trillion of it. Most of the rest is 5G home Internet, which CTIA puts at nearly 16 million subscribers: traffic outside smartphones grew from about 4 trillion MB in 2020 to about 77 trillion in 2025, roughly 60% of all the growth in those five years.
The government's price index gets to the same place without touching carrier revenue. The BLS wireless telephone services index, which prices service at constant quality, fell 28% between 2007 and 2025, and the all-items index rose 55%. Between 2020 and 2025, a stretch that included 8% inflation in 2022, the highest annual rate since 1981, the wireless index slipped 1.7% and the all-items index climbed 24%. Wages put it in the terms households live in. In 2007, at average hourly earnings of $20.91 for private-sector employees, the average connection's monthly service bill cost 141 minutes of work. In 2025, at $36.44 an hour, it cost 55 minutes. For production and nonsupervisory workers, the monthly bill went from 170 minutes of work to 63, an hour and 47 minutes handed back every month.
The evidence is bounded by a single source read in full, so the analysis cannot independently verify the CTIA survey methodology or the BLS quality adjustments beyond what the source describes. The service revenue and ARPU figures also exclude what customers pay for the phone itself, meaning the total cost of owning a smartphone may not show the same real decline. What to watch is whether fixed wireless home Internet continues to drive traffic and revenue growth, and whether the BLS constant-quality index keeps treating more data for the same price as a price cut.