There is one quiet provision of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that slipped under the radar. Congress is requiring that the FCC revamp broadband labels that describe the broadband product to customers, similar to the labels for food.

The Act gives the FCC one year to create regulations to require the display of a broadband label similar to the ones created by the FCC in Docket DA 16-357 in 2016. A copy of the FCC’s suggested broadband label from 2016 is at the bottom of this blog. The original FCC docket included a similar label for cellular carriers.

ISPs are going to hate this. It requires full disclosure of prices, including any special or gimmick pricing that will expire. ISPs will have to disclose data caps and also any hidden charges.

As you can see by the label below, it includes other information that big ISPs are not going to want to put into writing, such as the typical download and upload speeds for a broadband product as well as the expected latency and jitter.

To show you how badly big ISPs don’t want to disclose this information, I invite you to search the web for the broadband products and prices for the biggest ISPs. What you are mostly going to find is advertising for special promotions and very little on actual prices and speeds. Even when it’s disclosed it’s in small print buried somewhere deep in an ISP website. And nobody talks about latency and jitter.

What is even harder for ISPs is that they often don’t know the speeds. How does a telco describe DSL speeds when the speed varies by distance from the hub and by the condition of the copper wire on each street. I’ve seen side-by-side houses with different DSL speeds. Cable companies can have a similar dilemma since there seem to be neighborhoods in every city where the network underperforms – most likely due to degradation or damage to the network over time.

The sample label asks for the typical speed. Are ISPs going to take the deceptive path and list marketing speeds, even if they can’t be achieved? If an ISP tells the truth on the labels, shouldn’t it be required to submit the same answers to the FCC on the Form 477 data-gathering process?

I’m sure that big ISPs are already scrambling trying to find some way out of this new requirement, but that’s going to be hard to do since the directive comes from Congress. It’s going to get interesting a year from now, and I can’t wait to see the labels published by the biggest ISPs.