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FCC's 'Nutrition Labels' For Broadband Show Speed, Caps, and Hidden Fees (arstechnica.com) 99

Posted by msmash from the delicious-plans-nutritious-broadband dept.
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica article: The Federal Communications Commission today unveiled new broadband labels modeled after the nutrition labels commonly seen on food products. Home Internet service providers and mobile carriers are being urged to use the labels to give consumers details such as prices (including hidden fees tacked onto the base price), data caps, overage charges, speed, latency, packet loss, and so on. ISPs aren't required to use these labels. But they are required to make more specific disclosures as part of transparency requirements in the FCC's net neutrality order, which reclassified Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The FCC recommends that ISPs use these labels to comply with the disclosure rules and says use of the labels will act as a "safe harbor" for demonstrating compliance. However, ISPs can come up with their own format if they still make all the required disclosures in "an accurate, understandable, and easy-to-find manner," the FCC said today.
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FCC's 'Nutrition Labels' For Broadband Show Speed, Caps, and Hidden Fees More

FCC's 'Nutrition Labels' For Broadband Show Speed, Caps, and Hidden Fees

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  • Why? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If it's not required, what's the point?

    • Read between the lines. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by waspleg ( 316038 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @01:35PM (#51839175) Journal

      It says it guarantees Safe Harbor if they use the FCC format. What they will likely do is adopt the format and then try to weasel the information actually included and then claim Safe Harbor.

      Making it a "suggestion" and offering the carrot of Safe Harbor is about avoiding being instantly sued for issuing a mandate that the carriers don't want them to have the right to give in the first place.

      I'm pretty sure they're already being sued in as many ways as possible to stop their having any authority in the first place, I vaguely remember reading something about it.

      It seems fairly clever to me I just hope the FCC is ready for the manipulative ways it will be implemented (which will obviously be in as useless a way as possible by the carriers).

  • How do I tell if my broadband is organic?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jofas ( 1081977 )
      There's a "COG (Ceritified Organically-Grown)" symbol on the broadband. It's a bit of a lie, though..."Freerange broadband" just means the broadband lives in a 2'x2' cage rather than a 1'x1' cage. It doesn't mean your broadband gets to see the sun and eat bugs outside.

    • Doesn't matter - it's still GMO.

    • Unless it's fibre it's definitely not. If it is fibre, only if the cables are plastic, not glass, plastic being carbon-based.

      Copper is not organic. Neither is glass-fibre.

      Organic means made from "carbon based molecules".

    • If it starts to smell after a few weeks without refrigeration, then your broadband was probably organic.

  • They should also add 'potential side effects' section. For Comcast it would read something like:

    Warning! May cause inability to unsubscribe, blood in your stool, and impotent rage.

  • Should be required for all contracts of any kind (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @01:39PM (#51839205)

    I'm so sick and tired of deceptive sales practices which are technically legal but involve all manner of legalism and obfuscation to sell a thing which differs conceptually from what the buyer actually gets.

    This kind of thing should be required for any consumer contract advertising.

    The advertisers should literally not care if its there if what they're selling in the big print actually matches what they deliver in the small print. The only way they should complain is if they are lying or intentionally deceiving consumers.

    • Re:Should be required for all contracts of any kin (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @02:02PM (#51839419) Journal

      Capitalism starts to fail when companies spend most of their resources on trying to dupe customers rather than building a better mousetrap.

      For example, my online banking requires me to select a "payment type" for each and every transaction I submit, which is typically each monthly bill.

      I called customer support and asked to have it default to the payment type I use 99.9% of the time, but they said they'd put it in the wish-list and left me hanging.

      The reason they do that is that the actual default is a goofy gimmick account that requires registering online and receiving spam (if you read the fine-print). They force you to see it.

      They KNOW it's a time-waster to have the default payment type be the gimmicky one, but do it because they want their damned Spam-A-Tron promoted.

      And there are other time-wasting gimmicks that I won't go into. It adds up. I'm not saying we should switch to socialized banking, but these capitalists sure are giving capitalism a bad name and make people more likely to agree to big-co regulations during elections.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sims 2 ( 994794 )

        You mean like how suddenlink refuses to say what speeds they can sell you? http://i.pictr.com/2ii71jz9q6.... [pictr.com]
        Or like how Paypal always defaults to using your bank account and there is no option to change the default?

        a few years ago paypal fked up and credit cards were made default for about the whole month of December. There was a 10+ page thread on their support forms with people thanking them saying they wish they had done it sooner.

        They got it fixed in time for new years tho give people what they want? he

        • You know, if you don't like the way Paypal does things, you can feel free to open a competing service. That is how capitalism works.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sims 2 ( 994794 )

            Voting with my wallet means I use amazon or google to pay for things any time they are offered.

            That is how i'm told capitalism is supposed to work.

            I sent Paypal support a message yesterday about opting out of offers for Paypal credit. This is part of what I got back:

            "I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. We appreciate the time you've taken to write us with your comments about our service. The advertisement or the offer from PayPal Credit will automatically pop up and this is hard coded on t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Do away with custom contacts for most things like EULAs, and have a standard set of terms that the manufacturer can select from.

  • Glad to see latency and packet loss (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cweber ( 34166 ) <.cwebersd. .at. .gmail.com.> on Monday April 04, 2016 @01:54PM (#51839327)

    Even is ISPs are relatively transparent about what they sell you, it is always about maximum download and upload speed, and never about latency and quality of service. In fact, sales and first-tier support folks don't even know these terms, much less what their company's typical values are. In practice, a stable, low latency broadband connection with 15 Mbit/s cap gives you a better overall experience than a jerky, high latency connection which on paper tops out at 50 Mbit/s.

    I am very glad the FCC is including these numbers by default to judge a provider's disclosure practices.
    As an aside, test your connection at https://www.voipreview.org/spe... [voipreview.org] and see your latency, jitter and packet loss alongside the other metrics.

    • Latency and packet loss from any source to any destination? or withing the access network itself?? I mean if the company peers with many upstream transit providers via BGP they really aren't in control of average latency at all when it leaves their network. Also latency and packet loss will be higher during periods of congestion. Forget that most modern switches don't really even have buffers on 40g and 100g interfaces so when you aggregate you can still have discards when over the second you are nowhere cl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rakarra ( 112805 )

        Latency and packet loss from any source to any destination? or withing the access network itself?? I mean if the company peers with many upstream transit providers via BGP they really aren't in control of average latency at all when it leaves their network. Also latency and packet loss will be higher during periods of congestion. Forget that most modern switches don't really even have buffers on 40g and 100g interfaces so when you aggregate you can still have discards when over the second you are nowhere close to 100gbps...

        I'm not sure what it's like for Comcast now, but five-plus years ago they were well-known for having eternally-oversubscribed regional networks, and one dude with a huge download or torrent would raise pings and cause dropped packets for everyone.

        But yeah, it seems difficult otherwise to qualify what "packet loss" means. Is it, say, poor-quality lines to the local office, such that the customer's speed even to the ISP itself is slow? Or does that refer to the ISP's connections to the outside world? They're

    • VoIP and Netflix have opposite requirements (Score:5, Interesting)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @03:23PM (#51840177) Journal

      For voice over IP, 128kbps with very low jitter and low latency will give ideal results. More bandwidth will neither help nor hurt.

      For Netflix, it's all about about bandwidth, jitter doesn't matter at all and latency barely matters.

      For ssh, it's all about latency. Bandwidth and jitter don't matter. (Assuming at least 28kbps).

      It's a bit confusing for the average consumer. Heck, the average Slashdot reader doesn't know what jitter is.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      Interesting... The site at the link you provided has something from BIZX (.info) at it. Curious, that. They're now our non-robotic overlords. I think this is the first time I've seen them in the wild.

  • here's a better idea.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    quit shoveling the bullshit in the first place so such things aren't needed.

    set the monthly price. set the data speed, down and up. set the modem monthly rental rate.. that's it. no quotas, no bogus fees, no termination fees, no 'setup' fees, no term length contracts, no selling/giving our info away, no snooping/sniffing our data streams, no ad injections, etc etc

    a simple-no-bullshit-all-i-want-is-a-big-dumb-pipe-without-getting-buttfucked-by-the-isp plan.

  • Will ISP try to do stuff like well you can buy your own hardware but it takes a lot work to do so or if you do then any other service from us will not work. Just so they don't have to say that it is needed?

  • The labels just say that fees and taxes "varies by location". First off, is that even true of Federal fees and taxes? And secondly, how about a little transparency here, and link us to the anticipated extra costs of the government.

  • To list the price on a label, they'd have to pick a price. Not everyone in the same neighborhood even pays the same rate. It's whatever they can get away with. This could be very good (everyone gets fair pricing) or very bad (everyone gets the high price).

  • http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-... [arstechnica.net]
    http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-... [arstechnica.net]

    These should have been in PNG. Whoever picked JPEG for those images should take a few minutes to learn the difference between the two.

    • In other news, their gallery is hosted via Wordpress.

      This is just an artifact of an image gallery system that assumes photos. They didn't do anything special with this article other than use a generic photo gallery system.

  • Let the FCC use customer experience to do the labeling. It's precisely the kind of repository of info we need when choosing a service. Something like a "Consumer Report", if you will. And while they are at it, they need to prohibit exclusive contracts that suppress competition.

    • And while they are at it, they need to prohibit exclusive contracts that suppress competition.

      Those are state and local government agreements - they are outside the domain of the FCC.

    • And while they are at it, they need to prohibit exclusive contracts that suppress competition.

      But even places without exclusive cable franchises don't have competition in the cable market. It can't be the franchise that prevents it, it has to be something else.

  • And howzabout a guaranteed minimum download speed? I want some guaranteed minimum speed they would stand by and keep to, by repairs and upgrades to infrastructure. I know, that one is actually difficult and very expensive. But after years of deception and disappointment, they owe us truth about what we are buying.
    • I would actually be for this even if it is some absurdly shitty number like 14.4 Kbps just so that if they ever really screw the pooch you can brow beat them with that. Add in something like average and 95% bars for speed so that you have a fair comparison. Then again that sort of info is only really valid if you have choices.
      • If you think that's shitty, you don't have the provider I often have to connect with. There are times I'd give a testicle to get 14.4Kbps.

    • And howzabout a guaranteed minimum download speed?

      Sure, you just have to get Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and others to also commit to feeding your ISP every response, every packet destined for your ISP at a speed no less than the ISP's promised minimum download speed.

  • But I fail to see how it help so long as there is nothing to compare it to for any given market.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by s4m7 ( 519684 )

      Yeah, I guess I shouldn't complain.

      I've got two shitty, overpriced and under-performing services to choose from.

      Consumer Choice!

  • Second, kill all the marketers.

  • Other Need-to-know Information (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tokolosh ( 1256448 ) on Monday April 04, 2016 @05:17PM (#51841053)

    Should include:

    ISP packet inspection practices
    Ports blocked
    Protocols blocked
    Prioritization and/or throttling policies
    Double NATing
    IPv6 availability

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rhadc ( 14182 )

      Totally agree.

      In addition, zero-rated traffic types.

      I'd love to see this for small business Internet Access services. Availability of static v4/v6 assignments, etc.

  • This is great and all, but in most people's lives their internet access bill is a small part of their monthly expenses - let's apply the same logic to something that has a greater impact on a person's financial future: student loans. Imagine a one-page document that students must sign each school year that itemizes their borrowing like so: Name: Total amount borrowed to date: New amount to be borrowed this school year: Total amount owed at end of current school year: Grace period before loan repayment

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