FCC Publishes New Broadband Map, Votes to Require ISP ‘Nutrition Labels’

The Federal Communications Commission took two moves Friday to make shopping for home broadband less opaque: It released a new broadband map(Opens in a new window) and required internet providers to break out the details of their service(Opens in a new window) in a nutrition-label-style box.

The new map, called a “pre-production draft” in the FCC’s announcement, resembles the old one in that it lets you search for services at a specific address or browse at a neighborhood level and shows available providers with their maximum download and upload speeds.

But the old map (as shown in this 2018 FCC walkthrough video(Opens in a new window)) relied on provider filings that only went down to the census block(Opens in a new window), making it frequently inaccurate and uninformative.

“It’s wrong about my house!” complained then-FCC commissioner, now FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel at a 2018 conference in Washington hosted by The Atlantic. 

The new map relies on address-specific data from providers and allows third parties to challenge results they think are incorrect—a necessary step to advance the map past its draft state and guide broadband-buildout subsidies provided in last year’s infrastructure law.

For example, in one township in rural Michigan that I researched in 2019(Opens in a new window), the old FCC map listed one fixed-wireless provider and DSL by Frontier that weren’t actually available. The new map shows the services that I had confirmed to exist then, plus SpaceX’s Starlink.

But at the address of an apartment building on Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the new map listed satellite services unusable in that balcony-less building–not that anybody would want to use those slower services with cable available there from both Comcast and Astound (formerly RCN, but shown first on the map under a corporate moniker of “Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners”).

The new map, like the old map, doesn’t list rates. But the FCC’s other action Friday should make checking your possible costs much easier by requiring internet providers to itemize the key points of their services in a box modeled after the FDA’s Nutrition Facts labels(Opens in a new window).

The format includes fields for starting and non-promotional service rates, download and upload speeds, typical latency, modem or gateway rental fees, and data caps. Unlike the proposal outlined in January when the FCC voted to start writing this rule, the label doesn’t include a field for typical packet loss and only requires a link to a provider’s network-management policy instead of a description of it.

Checking these service details today often requires inspecting fine print on other parts of a provider’s site. Comcast, for example, has long stashed details of its upload speeds on a network-management disclosures page(Opens in a new window).

The FCC announcement says this will go into effect “after it has completed necessary next steps, including requirements under the Paperwork Reduction Act.” At that point, the new rule will require providers to post these labels prominently and in a machine-readable format. That last requirement should ease the way for broadband comparison-shopping tools.