Just last week, analyst reports from Wall Street investment firms highlighted the fact that revenues for wireless networks are going up rather than down for a change. We pointed out that what’s good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for the consumer, and new data from the Labor Department, highlighted by the Wall Street Journal, definitively shows that those wireless company revenue increases are coming right out of your pocket.  

The consumer price index for wireless phone service, a government-calculated metric for the price of cell service, is up 0.3 percent in June 2018 compared to a year earlier. That might seem like an insignificant difference, but technology improvements and competition have traditionally pushed that metric down, not up; the last such increase was in July 2016, nearly two years ago.