What's my Daily Value? Interpretation of network performance metrics in broadband consumer labels

Despite the importance of residential Internet, choosing Internet plans is often an opaque and frustrating process for consumers. To address this, United States regulatory authorities have proposed "broadband consumer labels", akin to nutrition labels, to improve transparency and empower consumers to make informed decisions, but to achieve their goal, such labels must both capture information relevant to consumers while being interpretable. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative interview study with Internet consumers in rural/suburban communities in the Appalachian region of the United States. We find that network metrics typically used to characterize Internet service plans in proposed broadband labels, such as speeds and latency, are difficult to interpret and do not capture valued attributes of Internet service such as reliability. As a result, consumers to adopt a variety of social strategies to map their perceived needs to advertised offerings. We conclude with implications for proposed broadband consumer labels.