Verizon has proposed to raise the rates on its so-called special access services by 6 percent, according to the coalition. Special access fees are the rates that businesses and other large telecom customers pay for connections to carriers' central switching facilities.

Members of the coalition planned to file petitions opposing the rate hike late Monday with the FCC, a coalition spokeswoman said.

While global broadband prices are dropping, Verizon has proposed its second increase in less than a year, said Maura Corbett, NoChokepoints' executive director.

"It doesn't take a PhD in Economics to figure out that if a company is able to continually raise prices in a market where the costs keep dropping, that it's probably using that market as its personal ATM machine," Corbett said in an email. "So while the rest of the economy struggles to recover from one of the worst economic downturns in history, Verizon continues to overprice this critical broadband input simply because nobody is stopping them."

Verizon said prices for affected DS1 and DS3 services have declined by more than 15 percent over the past decade, when adjusted for inflation, even after the proposed increase.