Your Home Internet Bill Can Be Deceptively Confusing. Now It’s (Slightly) Easier to Understand.

The true costs of a home internet plan must now be displayed up front due to a new government-mandated “broadband facts” label, modeled after the nutrition labels on packaged food, that internet service providers are required to include for each plan.

The labels, which took effect April 10, were created by the Federal Communications Commission under provisions in the 2021 infrastructure law written to help more Americans get online. These regulations require internet service providers to clear up confusion over their offerings by itemizing basic points of a service plan that might otherwise surprise subscribers after sign-up, including:

• the plan’s monthly rate before fees, during and after any promotional period
• the plan’s contract length, if any
• extra charges for things such as renting a modem
• available discounts and service-bundling options
• download and upload speeds
• latency as measured in milliseconds of response time
• any data cap and fees for exceeding it
• basic details about network-management policies

The FCC rules require providers to display this label on their websites so that subscribers can easily compare prices. ISPs have historically hidden details such as upload speeds and data caps, and the FCC has been working on the requirements for broadband labels since 2016, when the regulation was introduced.

“The new broadband label tells people the two most important things they need to know when they’re buying internet service, or any service: how much will they pay and what service will they get for that price,” Chhaya Kapadia, chief of staff at the Washington think tank New America’s Open Technology Institute, told Wirecutter via email.

The way ISPs have implemented labels has been a little messy so far. Take, for instance, Comcast, the nation’s largest broadband provider. The company’s pitch for a 300 Mbps Xfinity offering at a San Francisco Bay Area address glosses over that cable plan’s 20 Mbps uploads, 1.2-terabyte data cap (with $10 overage fees for each additional 50 gigabytes), and $79 monthly rate after 24 months on a $30 promotional baseline. The new broadband label on the same page surfaces those details—note that “typical” downloads and uploads exceed the advertised speeds—which shoppers previously had to dig to find beneath “Network Management,” “Data Plan,” and “Pricing & Other Info” links.

The label, however, puts the promotional rate in a boldface heading and relegates the non-promotional monthly charge to the paragraph below that.

And at first, the label failed to reveal the $15 rental fee that subscribers pay after a 24-month promotional period for an optional, Comcast-provided gateway combining a modem and a Wi-Fi router. (Buying your own cable modem usually lets you skip that surcharge.)

Telecom analyst Doug Dawson, president of CCG Consulting, called Comcast’s initial presentation of those costs “deceptive.”

“Comcast is the only ISP I found (looked at around 15 of them) that took the approach of highlighting the promotional price,” Dawson told Wirecutter via email.

Comcast called the absence of the $15 rental fee “a glitch” that it would fix, according to a statement shared with Wirecutter by Comcast spokesperson Joel Shadle; by Monday, April 22, the label disclosed the fee and the 24-month promotional waiver of it.

FCC spokesperson Will Wiquist said that he couldn’t comment on specific providers’ compliance but noted that as of April 24, the FCC had received more than 70 consumer complaints related to the labels rule.

Inexperienced internet users who are hazy about how low latency can sandbag a connection could also find the labels inscrutable, even with the FCC’s helpful glossary.

“I think a non-technical user might still struggle to understand some of the terms on the label,” Lorrie Cranor, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its CyLab, told Wirecutter via email. “They might see that this one has a higher download speed or a lower upload speed, but that doesn’t tell them what speed they should be looking for that would meet the needs of their household.”

In October, Cranor’s lab proposed a label design featuring color-coded assessments of a plan’s performance with such common tasks as video and gaming.

But label placement is another issue—ISPs are supposed to display them at “point of sale,” but Kapadia noted that doesn’t mean the same thing across service providers’ websites. For instance, the Santa Rosa, California–based provider Sonic posted its labels ahead of the FCC deadline, but its site isn’t set up to show them to somebody searching for service until they provide an email address; CEO Dane Jasper said the firm would change its label placement.

That visibility problem may improve this year: By October 10, providers with fewer than 100,000 subscribers are required to post their own labels, and all operators must post their label data in a machine-readable format for easier analysis by third parties. What Kapadia called a “data-geeky thing” could give researchers more insight about real-world connectivity costs; Cranor said machine-readable labels would make it easier to set up comparison-shopping sites that would help shoppers figure out which plan would work best for them.

But that’s the other big to-be-determined aspect of the labels: how many Americans can actually make much use of them. T-Mobile and Verizon fixed-wireless broadband (the single best benefit of 5G) has racked up millions of subscribers, but many people—between 22% and 27% of households, according to recent surveys—have only one home internet service provider to choose from.

“If there is only one provider in your neighborhood you have to either take it or leave it,” said Cranor. “The label may not be that helpful except maybe for deciding between the plans offered by that provider if they offer more than one option.”

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.