Compare fiber, cable and DSL plans.
Comparing internet plans on headline price alone favours the slowest option, and comparing on speed alone favours the most expensive. Cost per megabit per second puts all three technologies on one scale. It does not capture everything — fibre's symmetric upload and low latency are genuine advantages that this metric ignores — but it answers the question of which plan delivers the most throughput per unit of spend.
Cost per unit of speed
Cost per Mbps = monthly price / download speed, computed for each technology and compared
No. It ignores upload speed, where fibre is typically symmetric while cable and DSL are heavily asymmetric, and it ignores latency and jitter, which matter far more than raw speed for video calls and gaming.
Because its speed advantage is usually proportionally larger than its price premium. A fibre plan at twice the price of DSL commonly delivers fifteen times the speed.
Rarely. Beyond roughly 200-300 Mbps most households cannot use the extra capacity, because individual streams and servers become the bottleneck. Cost per Mbps keeps falling as you buy faster plans even when the benefit does not.