Internet Expenses Inflation
• reynd
I have covered inflation of so many things in the past. This is one more of them if you haven’t already gotten tired of reading. Inflation causes cost of items to go up over time. Take for example the cost of milk. It was half as expensive some 7 or 8 years ago. But not all things inflate. Some actually reduce in cost as time progresses. Technology for example falls in this space. A 32” TV is cheaper now than it was a couple of years ago because of advances in technology. Internet expenses for a fixed speed falls under this category too. Alternatively, you can think of it in this way – cost of internet remains the same as the speed increases over time.
As I always say, inflation is different for everyone. Since I have the bills for the last 8 years of my internet, I thought I will calculate the inflation. So here is what I paid each year for internet along with the bandwidth
| Year | Cost | Mbps |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 1500 | 4 |
| 2015 | 1400 | 4 |
| 2016 | 1100 | 5 |
| 2017 | 1500 | 25 |
| 2018 | 1200 | 25 |
| 2019 | 1100 | 30 |
| 2020 | 1100 | 30 |
| 2021 | 1000 | 100 |
| 2022 | 800 | 50 |
Can you imagine that I was paying Rs. 1500 for a 4 Mbps connection in 2014? And now I am paying half the price for 10 times the speed. Just in a span of 8 years. Of course I live in a place that is far from the city, so initially there were no internet providers and I had to pay what the one network provider demanded. Eventually as the city grew into the outskirts, I am reaping the benefit.
You will notice that I went for higher and higher speeds as my needs grew. But at 100 Mbps speed I felt that it was way more than we really needed. So I stepped it down to the now 50 Mbps. That is good enough for us. Anyway, lets forget about the speed and just use the expenses to calculate inflation. By that calculation, my internet inflation is -7.5%. A negative number (deflation) is always a good sign! However, this expense is such a small number compared to the rest of the expenses that it does not make any difference to my standard of living. It is just fun to calculate the inflation number that is all.