What "Authorized Dealer" Actually Means (And Why We’re Transparent About It)

From the outside, all the third-party sites that sell internet service look about the same. They show plans from a bunch of providers, they have a phone number, and they take care of getting you signed up. Customers reasonably ask: what's the difference between any of these, and is using one different from going direct?

The answer matters because the structural relationship between the third-party site and the carrier changes the kind of advice they can honestly give. Here's the breakdown of how the major models work and where we sit.

The four common third-party models

1. Lead aggregators

Sites like Allconnect, BroadbandNow, and HighSpeedInternet.com primarily sell your contact information as a lead. They don't have direct dealer agreements with most carriers — instead, they collect your address and phone number through a "check availability" form and then sell that lead to whichever carrier or sub-dealer pays the highest acquisition rate. The carrier then calls you.

From your perspective: the recommendation you see may be the highest-paying lead buyer rather than the best fit for your address. The "compare" function is real but the ranking can be financially incentivized rather than purely informational.

2. White-label marketplaces

Some sites partner with a single back-end fulfillment provider (often a large dealer themselves) and present a branded shopping experience that's actually selling the same plans through a single channel. The branding makes the experience feel curated; the plan availability and pricing are constrained to whatever the back-end partner sells.

These can be perfectly fine — if the underlying dealer represents a wide range of carriers, the customer experience is reasonable. If the underlying dealer represents only one or two carriers, the "compare" framing is misleading.

3. Direct-to-consumer affiliate sites

Affiliate sites earn commissions when their referrals convert into customers, but unlike authorized dealers they don't have direct sales agreements with the carrier — they're sending traffic and getting paid per signup. The customer interacts directly with the carrier's sales process; the affiliate just got the click.

These are common, generally honest, and often well-written. The main limitation is that they can't help you with the sales process beyond pointing you at the right page — they're not authorized to actually quote, structure, or close service for you.

4. Authorized dealers (us)

An authorized dealer has a direct sales agreement with the carrier under which the dealer is contractually authorized to quote, sell, and service plans on the carrier's behalf. We have these agreements with each of the {10 providers in our lineup}, and the agreements specify the program title we use for that carrier (Authorized Reseller, Authorized Sales Agent, Authorized Retailer, Authorized Dealer — varies by carrier and is reflected on each provider page on our site).

Being an authorized dealer means three concrete things:

• We sell plans at the same prices as the carrier sells them direct. Pricing is set by the carrier, not by us. We can't mark up.
• We're paid by the carrier when our referrals convert. The compensation comes from the carrier's marketing budget, not from your bill — there's no markup or hidden fee passed to you.
• We're contractually accountable for compliance with the carrier's marketing standards (FTC and FCC), accurate plan representation, and customer service quality. The carrier can revoke dealer status if we misrepresent their products.

Why we're transparent about all this

The FTC's Endorsement Guides require material relationships between recommenders and the products they recommend to be disclosed prominently. We disclose ours: we're paid by the carriers when we sign customers up, and that compensation is the entire reason this site exists as a business.

We don't think this disclosure undermines our usefulness — it explains how the math works. The carrier prefers paying a dealer to bring them a qualified, sized customer over paying for generic mass marketing. The customer gets sized advice they wouldn't get from a chatbot. The dealer earns commission for the work. Everyone's incentive is roughly aligned around getting customers into plans that actually fit them, because misfit customers churn quickly and don't earn long-term commission.

The model breaks when dealers chase highest-commission plans regardless of fit, which is the legitimate criticism aggregators sometimes face. Our internal answer to this is the way we structure recommendations: the household-sizing quiz on our homepage, the cost-per-Mbps analysis tool, the explicit "consider alternatives if" section on every provider page. These aren't compliance theater — they're how we make sure the easy thing for us (recommend the highest-margin plan) isn't necessarily what we recommend.

What this means for the advice you get

Three things follow from the authorized-dealer structure that are worth knowing as a customer:

1. The price is the price. If we quote you $69.99/month for Frontier Fiber 1 Gig, that's exactly the same $69.99/month you'd get going to Frontier directly. We don't mark up; we contractually can't.
2. We can only sell plans we're authorized to sell. Our lineup is 10 providers — Frontier, Optimum, Ziply Fiber, Hawaiian Telcom, altafiber, EarthLink, WOW!, DIRECTV, Kinetic by Windstream, BrightSpeed. We can't sell Spectrum, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or anyone else. When the best option at your address is one of those carriers, we'll tell you that and point you to them rather than steering you to a worse-fit plan from our lineup.
3. Service issues post-sale go to the carrier. Once you're a customer, billing questions, technical support, and outage reporting go to the carrier directly — they own the relationship. We can help if there's something we should know about (e.g., a billing issue with a plan we sold), but we don't have backend access to your account at the carrier.

The compensation disclosure, in plain language

We are compensated by participating carriers when customers sign up for service through us. This does not affect the price you pay.

That's the full picture. We don't think being a dealer is a problem — we think being an honest dealer is the actually-valuable thing, and we try to operate accordingly.

If you want to talk through what's actually right for your address, that's the call we're set up to take. Real local agents, no markup over going direct, no contract pressure. More about how we work on the about page.