Rani Molla for GigaOM:

So why haven’t wireline broadband prices budged in recent years? The high, fixed costs of broadband means that there hasn’t been a big rise in competition among providers, according to Scott Wallsten, Vice President for Research and Senior Fellow at Technology Policy Institute. Indeed, most Americans don’t have more than two options when it comes to wireline broadband providers.

So costs remain high because of scarcity of competition and an ever-increasing consumer dependence on the technology. Where I live, I have two choices for wireline broadband: my cable provider, or DSL (FIOS isn’t an option). So really, just one option. Because DSL sucks.

The potential for disruption, according to the article: the increasing deployment of LTE services. I doubt that’s realistic for quite some time: LTE service providers offer a fraction of the bandwidth caps that most wireline broadband service providers do.