How to read a Broadband Facts label
Every internet provider in the U.S. is required to publish one. It's the only document where the real monthly price, the typical speeds and every fee appear in the same place — and almost nobody reads it.
Check three lines and you've done 90% of the work: whether the monthly price is an introductory rate, what the typical upload speed is, and what the monthly fees add on top. Everything else on the label is useful, but those three are where plans differ most and where advertising misleads most.
An annotated label
This is NOW Internet's 100 Mbps label, one of the cleanest examples in the market. Notes are ours.
Why the label exists
Internet advertising has always had a gap between the price on the billboard and the number on the bill. The FCC's answer, modelled directly on the nutrition label, requires every provider to publish a standard disclosure at the point of sale for every plan: the monthly price, whether it's introductory, every recurring and one-time fee, the data allowance, and typical performance figures. Same fields, same order, every provider.
That standardization is the whole value. You can't meaningfully compare two marketing pages, but you can compare two labels line by line — and providers know it, which is why the best-value plans tend to have the plainest labels.
What "typical" actually means
The speed figures on a label aren't the marketing "up to" number — they're what the provider expects a real customer to see, measured across its network during busy hours. That's why NOW's 100 Mbps plan lists 117 Mbps typical download: cable plans often deliver slightly above their tier. And it's why fixed-wireless labels show a range rather than a figure, because a radio link genuinely varies with signal and congestion.
Latency is the most overlooked line on the label and the one we'd read second. Anything in the teens or twenties is good; wired connections cluster around 20 ms, fixed wireless slightly higher and more variable, and geostationary satellite in the hundreds. If your household lives on video calls or games competitively, that single number tells you more than the download speed does.
How to compare two labels in a minute
What a fixed-wireless label looks like
The format earns its keep when you put two technologies side by side. Here are the numbers Total Wireless publishes for its $60 5G home plan — same disclosure, very different shape from the cable label above.
The wide ranges are the honest part: a fixed-wireless plan really can deliver 20 Mbps to one house and 148 to another, and the label says so where the marketing page says “up to 200.” The fees column is genuinely clean — $0 activation, $0 provider fees, $0 termination. But note what isn't on the label at all: the router is sold separately, and no line item exists for hardware. See the cheapest 5G home internet under $50 for how that changes the comparison.
What the label won't tell you
It's a network-wide disclosure, not a promise about your house. It can't tell you that the cable segment on your street is oversubscribed, that the 5G tower you'd connect to is behind a hill, or that the local install team books three weeks out. It also says nothing about customer service, app quality, or how painful cancellation will be.
And it only describes the plan as sold today. A label showing a non-introductory price tells you there's no step-up scheduled; it doesn't stop the provider raising prices next year unless a separate guarantee says otherwise. That's why price locks are worth reading as a distinct promise — we compared the ones providers actually offer.
Where to find it
By rule it has to be at the point of sale, so look for a "Broadband Facts", "Pricing & other info" or "Plan details" link next to each plan on the provider's site — and in-store and on your bill's plan page too. If you can't find one, that's worth noting: providers with genuinely simple pricing tend to put the label a click away, and the ones burying it usually have a reason.
Priya has led consumer-tech coverage for over 15 years and sets the standards every ShopHighSpeed review follows.