Americans Pay More for Wireless ↦

Jon Stokes of Ars Technica reports on the findings of a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) survey:

If you think that your mobile phone bill is out of control, that’s apparently because it is. A new [OECD] survey has found that mobile users in the US, Canada, and Spain pay almost five times more for wireless service than their counterparts in the Netherlands, Finland, and Sweden, who pay the least.

For those of us frustrated with the tetrarchy’s delivery of the latest technologies, this report tells us something we already knew:

The report also takes note of a phenomenon that was starkly evident in this latest round of quarterly earnings releases: bandwidth providers across the industry, from Comcast to AT&T, saw profits jump, while network infrastructure makers from Cisco to D-Link saw huge revenue declines.

Clearly, service providers are extracting more money from the use of existing equipment. It’s good news for them, but equipment makers are getting whacked for the second time in a decade as infrastructure spending slows dramatically after a period of frenzied investment.