It's so high on everybody's list of problems that we've simply stopped acknowledging it. Beyond the real-dollar outlay for WAN links, there is enormous waste in our scramble to reduce service costs. We rip out perfectly good equipment to slice ongoing expenses by a few percent. Shifts in carrier tariffs create and destroy entire product lines. Developers are forced to build, and rebuild, applications to respect low-bandwidth links.
Network administrators adopt elaborate schemes to analyze and distribute costs back to the user.
This is complete insanity, and nobody's running the asylum. Meanwhile, the cost of providing WAN services has plummeted. The per-port cost for switching equipment has plummeted. And standard platforms have reduced the cost of managing networks, or at least held it constant. Nonetheless, the price of a T1 hasn't dropped substantially for the customer.