The FCC is still considering the use of broadband labels that are supposed to explain broadband to customers. This sounds like a really good idea, but I wonder if it’s really going to be effective?

Some of the items included on the FCC sample label are great. The most important fact is the price. It has become virtually impossible to find broadband prices for many ISPs. Many ISP, including the largest ones, only show special pricing online that applies to new customers. These ISPs show the public the sale prices, but it’s often impossible to know the list prices. It’s often the same if somebody calls an ISP – they’ll be offered different promotional packages, but it’s like pulling teeth to get the truth about the everyday price that kicks in at the end of a promotion.

I’m curious about how the broadband labels will handle bundling. The surveys we’ve done recently show that half or more of homes in many markets are still buying a bundle that might include broadband plus voice, cable TV, security, smart home, or cellular. Big ISPs have never wanted to disclose the cost of individual products inside of a bundle and I can’t wait to see how ISPs handle a bundled broadband product.

There are also hidden fees and other ways to disguise the real price. Disclosing pricing will be a huge breath of fresh air – if ISPs are forced to be totally honest. I can imagine the PR and marketing groups at the bigger ISPs are already agonizing over how to disclose pricing while still keeping it cloudy and mysterious.

More perplexing is the broadband speed issue. The sample label that the FCC circulated for comment would require ISPs to list the typical download speeds, typical upstream speeds, typical latency, and typical packet loss. What does typical mean? Consider a Comcast market where the company sells residential broadband that ranges between grandfathered 50 Mbps and 1.2 Gbps. What is the typical speed in that market? How will any consumer be able to judge what a typical speed means?

I’ve written about broadband speeds a lot, and for many technologies, the speeds vary significantly for a given customer during the day. What’s the typical broadband speed for a home that sees download speeds vary by 50% during a typical day? I don’t always want to come across as skeptical, but I’m betting that the big cable companies will list the marketing speeds of their most popular broadband product and call it typical. Such a number is worthless because it’s what customers are already being told today. I don’t have a proposed solution for the various speed dilemmas, but I fear that whatever is told to customers will be largely uninformative.

What will the typical consumer do when told the typical latency and packet loss? It’s hard to think many homes will understand what those terms mean or what the typical values mean.

ISPs are also supposed to disclose network management processes. Does this mean a cable company must be truthful and tell some neighborhoods that their coaxial cable is too old and needs to be replaced – because that is s specific network practice? Will a cable company tell a customer that their neighborhood node is oversubscribed, which accounts for slowdowns at peak times? I’m guessing the network management processes will be described at the total market level instead of at the neighborhood level – again, making them largely uninformative.

I’m also curious how the FCC will know if customers are being told the truth. Folks who read this blog might tell the FCC if a broadband label is deceptive or wrong – but what is the FCC going to do with such complaints? Broadband issues are often hyper-local, and what happens on my block might be different than somebody living just a few blocks away.

I want to be clear that I am not against the broadband labels. Forcing ISPs to be public with prices is long overdue, as long as they disclose the truth. But I’m skeptical about many other things on the labels, and I fear big ISPs will use the labels as another marketing and propaganda tool instead of disclosing what people really need to know.