Really Misleading Ads From Broadband Providers 256
Bourdain writes "Gizmodo has put together a good compilation of the — seemingly almost criminally — misleading (largely plain wrong) advertising from our favorite local monopolies. My personal favorite is from AT&T which states you need 3mbps to use social networking sites like Facebook."
BT (Score:4, Interesting)
British Telecom are claiming that their ADSL package gives you the best connection... of course, it's the best connection to the local wireless router, and not the connection to the gateway... they have an enormous router with a high gain antenna set (and a phone handset for VoIP).
They can't bring themselves to admit that the cable provider walks all over them in terms of actual bandwidth.
Re:0_0 (Score:2, Interesting)
Some companies add latency and lag to their lower end connections to get people to pay up for higher speed ones.
Re:12 mpbs for online games!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Something to keep in mind about that kind of nonsense is the corresponding upstream bandwidth that, IME, is usually a small fraction ( like 1/8th ) the downstream ) unless you get into the business packages. As such, depending on the activity, you might need the 10mbs package in order to have enough upstream activity for the activity in question.
Personally, I'd rather have a more balanced package with the burstmode going both directions, but I get tired of the RCA dog expression from the technician when I ask for better upstream....
Re:0_0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Some companies add latency and lag to their lower end connections to get people to pay up for higher speed ones.
[citation needed]
Re:Facebook bloat (Score:3, Interesting)
I used Facebook on a 56k modem the other day...didn't take long to uncheck "automatically load images".
I logged into Yoville for a laugh and it took 20 minutes to enter the first room, so, yeah, it's not too far off.
A variant... (Score:2, Interesting)
My favorite of these were the old Comcast ads.
The ones that said something alone the lines of " Unlimited internet! Download music and more!"
QWEST where 3 = 2.66 (Score:2, Interesting)
Except it is not 3 mbps, it is 2.66. QWEST says "Well, we mean up to 3 mbps." But it is never up to 3 mbps. It is always at 2.66. But that is OK with QWEST because they call it good if it is within 80% of 3 mbps.
Also I learned that the reason I am not seeing 3 mbps is because of "overhead".
I hated to do it but I switched to cable. I am paying for 5 and it is always above 5.
Re:What hacks me off. (Score:5, Interesting)
All that most anyone needs is maybe 3mb and even that would allow you to some some video streaming (Perhaps not in HD) 5mb would do most American's just fine for now.
Fixed that for you. 56K was enough for most uses in 1999, when Flash was used sparingly, coding was still fairly tight, patches for Windows were a few hundred KBytes and were one-or-two at a clip, not a dozen every Tuesday. In 1999, we used HTML, not AJAX, and our monitors were still 1024x768. "Streaming video" was at best 15fps and extremely blocky at 320x24. Digital cameras started at $400, were 1megapixel (tops), and photos were either printed out or burnt to CD instead of being uploaded somewhere. MP3s were typically encoded at 128kbps and shared on Napster. Microsoft Word was still duking it out with WordPerfect and bought on CD, which also was a feasible medium to backup our 10GByte hard drives.
Over the last decade, Myspace, Facebook, Photobucket, Youtube, Hulu, Google Docs, Mozy, and nearly a gig's worth of Windows patches have changed the way we use the Internet. What about the next decade? Do you think that 3Mbits/sec is going to be enough in 2019? I doubt it.
Re:0_0 (Score:3, Interesting)
But do a tracer[t/oute] and you'll find you really do get that speed... to the local router, where you get 80kbps and not a penny more.
With DOCSIS cable modems (read: pretty much every cable provider in the US) the throttling is only done in your cable modem itself, so you're going to get exactly what speeds they advertise. If you don't trust it, there are ways you can download your modems operational parameter file (given to it by your ISP) via tftp and see them for yourself. If you still think your ISP is capping you at the head end, you can always test this by uncapping your cable modem by sending it a different set of operational parameters, but you will get in trouble for doing so if you're caught.
And I'm fairly certain that latency throttling (for e.g. video games) isn't something you can do with DOCSIS modems so long as you aren't exceeding the bandwidth limitations that your modem has been given by your ISP. That said, the conspiracy theory introduced by this post [slashdot.org] isn't true, at least not for most cable ISP's in the US.
I imagine with DSL, fiber, or some other kind of connection this may be possible, but I don't know.
Re:The biggest ISP lie of all (Score:3, Interesting)
Not much faster. I tend to find that the limit is the number of people seeding, not necessarily their connection speed. Personally I simply don't have the hard disk space to hold on to everything I download for seeding. Even if I did, lets say I had 40 different hd shows I was seeding at the same time, and suppose they were all equally in high demand. How fast are each of those 40 different threads going to be able to take content from my end? Yeah. Anyways, typically though I'll seed something for about a week and then I'll end up deleting the file (How many times am I going to watch dexter season 2 episode 3 for example? Typically I'll only watch something once before deleting it.)
If most people have the same habits as I do (and I think they do, just most don't admit to it, whereas I'm not afraid to,) the speed of torrents will always be limited by that, and this is one of the shortcomings of p2p.
Not only that but I've taken a peek at the speeds several of the seeders are pushing to me when I download, and typically I am pushing out data faster than they are sending it to me, and many of these people are in countries where bandwidth is supposedly dirt cheap, meanwhile I've only got 2mbit upstream speed. Go figure.
While I could be wrong about this, I think broadband speed capabilities are growing faster than the need for them (read: available content) are growing, at least in most areas of the US. Think about it: Outside of p2p (which is illegal anyways) how would having more bandwidth help you once you could, say for example, stream four simultaneous HD streams at once? Because I can already do this, and I don't really even need to do this.
Even with p2p, I literally download more stuff than I even have the time to watch. I have an entire season of dexter I haven't watched yet, and I'll probably watch those after I've finished watching the last season of penn and teller.
Something else seems strange to me (Score:2, Interesting)
The US is where Internet was born and, consequently, where it is the most developed. Yet prices for ADSL connections are way higher than in my country (Romania). I admit, minimum wage is way higher in the US, but still. Besides, prices for almost anything else, from food to clothing to electronics, are way lower in the US.
Long story short, a 20mbps adsl connection here is EUR12.5, meaning around $17.99. Taxes included. So.... umm.... what gives?