The Verge wants to know how much you are paying for the internet

You don’t always get what you pay for with Internet access. Most places have only one option, so you are forced to choose the right or wrong plan from a single operator, and if the expensive “broadband” plan turns out to be closer to the speeds of dial-up, there isn’t much you can do. And that’s without going into the great swathes of the country that don’t even have a broadband option on the table.

So we join in Consumer Reports take a close look at the problem, collecting as many internet bills as possible to get a feel for which telecommunications are holding their end of the market – and which are failing. The idea is to have an overview of what speeds people are actually getting and what they are paying for those speeds.

To make this happen, we want to take a look at your internet bill. Consumer Reports has set up a site to collect your information and do a quick speed test. This should take about seven minutes, and you will be doing your part to build a better Internet.

A few quick notes on privacy: your invoice will be encrypted as soon as you update it, and Consumer Reports is committed to only recording relevant data such as price, plan, speed and hidden charges, and they will delete invoices when they are no longer needed. The site will ask you to create a username in order to maintain the confidentiality and security of the information, but you will not have to pay anything and no personally identifiable information will be shared with outside researchers. You can get more answers on the details here.

We hope this project will give us tens of thousands of invoices to review and stimulate great investigations for later in the year. So head over to the site and show us your invoice – and in a few months we’ll tell you what we found.