Internet Service Providers Editing and Proofreading Services

An ISP advertises a residential plan at a headline speed and describes it in the terms of service as subject to network management during periods of congestion. A regulator opens an inquiry after subscriber complaints, and asks the provider to point to where a customer could have learned that the plan is deprioritised after a monthly threshold, what that threshold actually is, and what speed applies once it is reached. None of the three appears anywhere in the document, and the provider spends the next several months negotiating a consent agreement over language it wrote itself.

We edit what internet service providers produce — terms of service and acceptable use policies, broadband facts labels and speed disclosure statements, network management practice disclosures, subscriber agreements and service level commitments, outage notification and credit policies, regulatory filings and complaint responses, installation and equipment documentation, privacy and data handling notices, and retention and cancellation communications. Our editors work on the disclosure a regulator asks a provider to point to.

The network management and speed disclosure section is the part a complaint turns into an inquiry over, and its failure is a description broad enough to cover the practice without ever telling a subscriber what will actually happen to their connection. We work through these so a threshold that triggers any change in service is stated as a specific number with the period it applies to, rather than referenced as congestion or heavy use, since a subscriber cannot avoid or plan around a limit they were never given; so the speed that applies after the threshold is stated as its own figure alongside the headline speed, given that a plan advertised at one rate and delivered at another after a certain point is describing two different products under one number; so the conditions under which management is applied are described specifically enough to be checked — at which point in the network, during which hours, affecting which traffic — because a disclosure a subscriber cannot test is one a regulator treats as no disclosure at all; so the headline advertised speed is tied to the actual measurement basis behind it, since a rate stated without saying whether it is a maximum, a typical, or a peak-hour figure means something different to every reader; and so any term that limits a commitment appears in the same place as the commitment itself, given that a service level promised on one page and qualified fifteen pages later is the pattern complaints are built on. Disclosures written this way answer the question the inquiry opens with.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including subscriber terms, network practices and regulatory correspondence. We are editors rather than telecom lawyers, regulatory consultants or network engineers, and we offer no view on network management practices, disclosure obligations or compliance. What we can do is make sure a subscriber can find what will actually happen to their connection.