Shopping for Internet Plans Can Be Confusing. New Rules Will Simplify It

• Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). This government program helps low-income households pay for broadband. Eligible recipients can receive up to $30 a month for internet service. The label will indicate yes or no if the plan is part of the program.

• Speeds. You will see typical download and upload speeds, expressed in megabits per second (Mbps). Latency speeds, a measure of internet responsiveness, will also be shown and expressed in milliseconds (ms).

But this can get tricky. What’s typical for one consumer may not be for another.

Several factors can affect the speeds a consumer experiences, including the number of devices in the home tapping into broadband, the quality of your modem and router and how many people are competing for broadband in your neighborhood.

• Data included with monthly price. If you don’t have an unlimited plan and are responsible for additional data charges, that will be reflected here.

• Privacy and network management. The label should include links to the ISP’s policies on network management, such as under what circumstances it may block content; or throttle or slow down your connection; and protect your privacy, regarding how it handles your personal data.

• Customer service. A specific phone number and email address should be listed.

Where will you see the labels?

The FCC is requiring companies to display the labels at the point of sale, which may include websites, provider-owned stores and other retail outlets. The label itself must be presented, not an icon or link to the label.

“By requiring that providers display introductory rates clearly, we are seeking to end the kind of unexpected fees and junk costs that can get buried in long and mind-numbingly confusing statements of terms and conditions,” the FCC’s chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, said in a statement. “You shouldn’t have to be a lawyer to know just what is in your internet service plan or an engineer to understand just how your provider is treating your data.” 

One place you won’t see the labels, at least under the current rule, is on your monthly bill. Still, labels are supposed to be displayed at online billing portals. And providers must make a label available within 30 days to customers who request it.

Accessible to non-English speakers, disabled people

If a company advertises in more than one language in the United States, such as Spanish, it must make the labels available in those languages. The FCC says this will help promote digital equity, the universal ability to access and use online resources, among fast-growing populations of Hispanics and Asian Americans. 

Labels must be “machine readable,” which the FCC points out is “data in a format that can be easily processed by a computer without human intervention while ensuring no semantic meaning is lost.” Machine readers of one kind or another may help a blind person or other people with disabilities make out the contents of web pages.

An internet service provider will have to make all of its nutrition label information available on a spreadsheet on its website. Other groups will be able to use this information to better analyze plans and create comparison tools that would help consumers in their search for the least expensive, highest speed plan that suits their needs.