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."
need more speed! (Score:3, Funny)
Apparently I need a faster connection to use sla
Re:Suggestion: Don't accept abuse. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's social engineering. The corporations have been getting the last two generations accustomed to their dishonesty. No one cares anymore, unless and until a health issue is involved. Then, no one cares until some activist watchdog screams to the courts. Americans in particular, and earthmen in general are placid little sheep, willing to accept anything the advertisers throw at them.
Re:Suggestion: Don't accept abuse. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's outrage fatigue. There are so many scummy things going on, you don't know where to start, where to focus. And there's not much agreement on just what is both scummy and important. Is pornography a worse problem than corporate dishonesty? What about child porn? Then there are many people out there trying to whip up outrage for their own ends. Big Media and the Republicans are especially prone to trying such, and falling for it too. Should Clinton have been impeached over Lewinsky? Scummy, yes, but was it important? The Republicans kept asking where was our outrage? There was such a load of fake dudgeon over that.
I find corporate dishonesty and irresponsibility and their reckless disregard, misunderstanding, and abuse of science far more troubling than the myriad sordid little affairs involving the powerful and famous. I recall the CEO of a major air conditioning manufacturer joking that if Global Warming was real, then he liked it because it would be good for his business. And Exxon taking a leaf from Big Tobacco, and making a fool's calculation that sowing confusion and delay over Global Warming was good for their business. Marketing has long since crossed the line. The auto mechanic tries to suggest your car needs extensive repairs, tries to play on fears of a breakdown, and the automakers and dealerships sure don't mind as you might instead go for a new car. The lawn care industry would have you plant the worst possible grass for your climate and have you think everything else is a weed so that you must extensively water, fertilize, apply herbicide, and wear out equipment faster. Big Pharma is always exhorting you to "Ask your doctor about" the latest miracle brand name pill. And so on. Lately, we have the finance industry still daring to suggest that they have to pay outrageous compensation, advancing the pathetic pretext that they'll lose their best people if they don't. These are merely the obvious whoppers that aren't fooling many, and that make easy fodder for comedy news shows. What's scary is you know there just has to be a whole lot of other, sneakier lies that have yet to be uncovered.
Facebook bloat (Score:5, Funny)
My personal favorite is from AT&T which states you need 3mbps to use social networking sites like Facebook.
Have you tried to use Facebook recently? Sounds about right!
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah...but for most people "facebook" includes all the flash games, etc. I don't know many facebook users who don't play them.
Same with email...in theory it's only 2k of text per message but most people I know have hundreds of megs of pps files in their inbox. A modem isn't going to cut it for them.
Re:Facebook bloat (Score:4, Informative)
Http://lite.Facebook.com
Re:Facebook bloat (Score:5, Funny)
Your bandwidth is irrelevant. You just need something on the order of a quad-core i7 to handle the Javascript.
Of course, that doesn't help with the other bottleneck, which is that the entire site seems to be served from a single 486.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dad?
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, so you're saying the parent post is masculine?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I love some of their plans (Score:5, Insightful)
"Max"
"Max Plus"
"Max Turbo"
Do these people even know what the word "maximum" means?
Re:I love some of their plans (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, for that matter, "turbo".
Although the all-time ridiculously overstated product name has to be the Gillette Fusion Power Stealth.
Re:I love some of their plans (Score:5, Funny)
Fusion Power Stealth... [youtube.com] yep.
Re:I love some of their plans (Score:4, Funny)
Wait for the Gillette Fusion Power Stealth Extreme Plus 3000.
Re:I love some of their plans (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Do these people even know what the word "maximum" means?
They're smart engineers. [xkcd.com]
Re:I love some of their plans (Score:5, Funny)
- Naturally Aspirated
- Venturi Affected Plenum Chamber
- Forced Induction (Blown)
- F1 (120% Volumetric Efficiency
Sign-ups seem slow...
Re:I love some of their plans (Score:4, Funny)
But can I get your service with a hemi?
Re:I love some of their plans (Score:5, Funny)
- Forced Induction (Blown)
Give me 20 minutes with an air compressor and one of their marketing executives and I'll show them what forced induction is all about.
Re: (Score:2)
- Forced Induction (Blown)
Might want to skip that one, they all blow.
Re: (Score:2)
F1 is naturally aspirated.
Re:I love some of their plans (Score:5, Funny)
Pffft. My ISP goes to 11.
Re: (Score:2)
People talk about the race to the bottom when it comes to quality and cost, but I think this is the real race to the bottom. We have so much market speak that pretty much says "Better than what you have" but uses all the extreme words available. We have already crossed the most extreme possible in coherent English so now we just invent random definitions.
Predictable enough, society has evolved to just comprehend such things as everyday "commodities" thou we still expect to see those odd words. Sad part i
In their defense... (Score:2)
0_0 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair 1.5 plans are really starting to feel sluggish these days.
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.
Re:0_0 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:0_0 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure if you're trying to be sarcastic or actually serious, but I always watch and I very consistently get my full 1.5Mbps down, from my ISP at least. There are several reasons 1.5Mbps feels sluggish these days though.
1. Websites in general are a *lot* more bloated than they were 10 years ago. Dialup really isn't fast enough for even just basic web browsing any more. Imagine trying to browse nfl.com with a 56K.
2. Many websites are simply overloaded, or intentionally restrict bandwidth. A good example (of the former I hope) is Youtube. Many times I've gone to watch a video, and no matter how much bandwidth I have there, it just doesn't download fast enough to keep up. A great example of the latter is ASUS' driver server. Good luck getting anything over 10KBps from there. (Actually, good luck getting even 10KBps.)
Re: (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
Re: (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: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: (Score:3, Insightful)
I know ISPs will fuck with your bandwidth, but...
Actually, lag injection doesn't sound that far-fetched given the quality of most ISPs.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, lag injection doesn't sound that far-fetched given the quality of most ISPs.
It also doesn't sound far-fetched that Microsoft heats their campus by burning the bodies of orphans. Doesn't mean it's happening.
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook really should sue them (Score:2)
My personal favorite is from AT&T which states you need 3mbps to use social networking sites like Facebook.
Some people might see that, think their connection is too slow and not use Facebook. That's some pretty clear defamation right there.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, like they're not even going to try to visit it even once.
Re: (Score:2)
Entirely too many users wouldn't. They just assume that if they try something, they could screw up everything, and so they'd better not try, even though the computer is peppered with "Are you sure?" dialog boxes.
The first steps to becoming truly computer literate are to start actually reading the dialog boxes, and to start screwing around, knowing that you can almost always undo it easily, and you'll almost always get an "are you sure" before you do something stupid, and definitely before you do something i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I know what you mean. To our generation and later, it's feels retarded how ingrained it is in the previous generations not to touch the all powerful computers.
Even our teaching style is geared toward "doing what you are supposed to do or what everyone else does" instead of critical problem solving abilities. We really should be teaching people how to teach themselves. Give the basic toolset and let them "mess around". Its funny how we (and most of the animal kingdom) as a species survived and expanded f
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
An example would be you accidentally hit the 'Save' button for a document after making a major error such as blowing away important text..
I know for a fact that ctrl+Z still works in Kate, and I've not yet run into a limit with how far back it will go -- but I assume you're talking about office documents. Just tried it in OpenOffice, and it works the same way -- "save" in no way clears the "undo" chain.
Then you panic and exit the program... go back to My Documents, to re-open the file, only to find the file is still blank.
Why would you do that? The kind of users I'm talking about would most likely look for a way to fix it inside the editor itself.
Accidentally dragging files to some folder, and forgetting about them.. accidentally dragging folders to the trash...
On KDE, this is mitigated by the fact that the drag and drop pops up a menu asking whether you want to move, copy, or
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: (Score:2)
Ha! I can't even get a stable connection (100% signal strengths, but too many WAPs nearby and tried all channels) on my wireless connection to my own WAP! Heh. I gave up and went back to good old fashion CAT5 ethernet network cables. :)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For any fixed location computer there is no reason not to use Ethernet, it is faster and more reliable[1]. The only reasons to ever use Wifi are for portable devices, such as laptops, where the cords would be problematic, or if you are not able to run cable a fixed device in an acceptable fashion.
[1] Especially if you have separated your router (which is probably also your DHCP server) from the AP, as that keeps the wired computers running when the AP decides to crash, as all home APs have a tendency to do,
Re: (Score:2)
It's no different in the US. If you look at the advertising, AT&T offers less than a quarter of what Comcast offers for basically the same price. Granted there are a LOT of short comings in Comcast, and some benefits to DSL, but those things never show up in the market speak from both. If you just look at what is advertised, you begin to wonder how AT&T's broadband division even exists year to year. Do they get tax credits, are their customers really that lazy or ignorant, is there some secret s
What hacks me off. (Score:2)
What hacks me off about ISP's is the available packages for internet.
I just moved up to Colorado, and I had to sign up for internet at my new apartment. It was DSL, and the available packages were as follows...
1.5mb
3.0mb
7.0mb
10.0 mb
When in reality all that I need for gaming, and some Hulu action is perhaps 5mb, but they get you to take that extra jump to 7mb so they can charge you more. All that most anyone needs is maybe 3mb and even that would allow you to some some video streaming (Perhaps not in HD) 5mb
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's kind of funny. My local phone co-op only offers 1 meg download speed, and I'll be dipped in snot if it doesn't stream hulu (non HD) just fine.
Re: (Score:2)
5mb would do most American's just fine.
Of course not. You never have enough bandwith. The biggest restricting factor in online services is a lack of bandwith. The Internet could be so much more awesome if only people had more bandwidth.
And besides, DSL is perfectly capable of doing 20 Mbit, so you shouldn't accept lower speeds than that. And even 20 Mbit is pretty low on the scale, since the cable companies (using DOCSIS 3) are already pushing 200 and 400 Mbit downstream speeds, not to mention the fact that glassfiber to the home is around the c
12 mpbs for online games!!! (Score:2)
On the bright side, if you're just sending and receiving emails, a 3mbps connection will suffice.
Re: (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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see any technical reason not to offer symmetric packages. I've always assumed it's to curb P2P *grumble*
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, but upstream is a juicer that they extract from businesses.
Re:12 mpbs for online games!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
For most people "Email" means logging in and downloading a bunch of humorous and/or motivatinal PPS files so they're not too far off the mark when they say 3mbps minimum.
Re: (Score:2)
Now I have 20 Mb (same ISP) and I have to "suffer" 100ms latency in CoD:MW2 : (
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I can kinda agree with them (Score:2)
Have to remember that not only does online gaming entail transferring game data, which is low bandwidth and mostly latency important, but it increasingly means transferring game assets which are much larger. Patches for MMOs, new maps for FPSes, heck even buying whole games digitally. It's cool stuff but you want some heavy hitting bandwidth for it. It would suck to connect to a TF2 server and have a map end, just as you'd finally got the file downloaded.
You have to remember that part of having a high speed
No kidding! (Score:2)
Right on, bruddah! You can't browse facebook with less than 10mbps. Any slower and it'll take forever for the four videos, two slideshows, background music, and flash animation to load. What were they thinking?!?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Any slower and it'll take forever for the four videos, two slideshows, background music, and flash animation to load.
Thats myspace your thinking of.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Out of curiosity, have you ever actually visited Facebook? It's actually very bandwidth-conservative as far as sites go. You'll never see more than one video per-page, nor will you ever encounter background music, and I have no idea if it can even do Slideshows, but if it can you have to click-through to them.
In short, you're full of crap.
pice you pay for a connected world... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:pice you pay for a connected world... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the US we are still in stone age compared to 3rd world countries like Korea when it comes to bandwidth.
That phrase... I don't think it means what you think it means...
Re: (Score:2)
See: Irony [wikipedia.org]. In this case, either "comic" or "tragic" would be appropriate.
Re: (Score:2)
He's right. There is no 2nd world because that's trademarked by 2nd Life
Poor metric. (Score:2)
internet a utility that I use for average 8hrs a day. That is pretty steep compared to electricity which I use 24hrs a day
Your power runs 110Hz.
Your DSL runs at.... 3000000Hz. And is bi-directional.
I never have any voltage fluctuations or power outs
Your power never goes out? That may be true depending on where you live, or at least extremely rare, but you definitely have voltage fluctuations.
Also, the costs of the power network are born by more users.
The sad part (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No, they just don't want it used all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference. It turns out that one of the great things about packet switched links is as you get more and more people, you can share bandwidth further. What I mean is that if I as a single person want a fast link, say 10mbps, I have to get a 10mbps link. However, turns out that I can have another person (my roommate) on that link and it'll still be about equally fast for both of us. We don't use it all the time, and as such 10mbps is just about as fast for two as it is for one. We don't need 20mbps just because there's another person.
This holds true as you go up the chain. This also allows for ISPs to sell access to consumers for cheaper than what it costs them. An OC-3 (155mbps) to a Tier-1 provider can run you $30,000/month or more. By the numbers that means that a 10mbps connection from that would cost about $2,000/month. However, if you oversubscribe it, sell more bandwidth than you have, you can lower the cost. Turns out this works well, since it is still fast for everyone. People get cheap connections for a low cost.
Ok well the problem is this all breaks down if people try to use their connection full blast 24/7. Because they are using it all the time, it saps bandwidth from others. The sharing only works on the assumption that everyone doesn't use it full blast all the time. The load is sporadic.
In the case of the OC-3, suppose you sell 10mb connections at $50/month, and you make $10/month profit on each. That means you need 600 subscribers. However, if they all tried to use their connections full blast, they'd only get about 260kbps each. For customers to maintain fast access, usage needs to be sporadic, which it normally will be.
That's the problem. They are ok with you using your speed. They aren't ok with you using it all the time to the max (which people who go nuts on torrents do). If you want that, you have to pay more (business accounts usually offer that, mine does). You can expect extremely cheap access that is also very fast.
You find this even in company LAN/WANs. We have gigabit ethernet at work. Gig right to your desktop. It's nice. However, it is only that fast if people use it as needed and don't run their connections full blast all the time. Reason is our switches only have gig uplinks. So there'll be anywhere form 1-24 computers with gig links that have gig back to the floor switches. Those switches also have gig links. So you then have 48 rooms that all have gig back to the building switch. That then has a gig link back to the core, so the whole building, all 700 computers or so, only has 1gb back to the core. As such if everyone tried to use their full 1gig all the time across the core, it'd go rather slow for everyone. That doesn't happen though. People get what they need and then their usage falls idle, making it fast for everyone despite the oversubscription.
It's also the only way to do it. There is no way we could afford the network equipment to give everyone dedicated gig bandwidth. It would take room switches from little $100-200 gig jobs to $3000+ switches that have 1-2 10gb uplinks. Floor switches wouldn't be $3000 gig pizza box Ciscos, they'd be $100,000 modular blade routers loaded with 10gb cards and OC-768 uplinks. The core switches would probably have to be CRS-1s.
The Internet as we enjoy it, where we can get cheap access that is reasonably fast, relies on the idea of sharing bandwidth. That means we all can't use all our bandwidth all the time.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're absolutely right. If only the broadband providers were truthful in advertising what their oversubscription rates were. Might as well be up front about it.
Re: (Score:2)
The Internet as we enjoy it, where we can get cheap access that is reasonably fast, relies on the idea of sharing bandwidth. That means we all can't use all our bandwidth all the time.
True, and another way to put this is that using a packet-switched system as if it were a circuit-switched system is never, ever going to be a good idea.
Re: (Score:2)
Aah, Canadian Rogers user. Back when I was still with Rogers, we had an "unlimited" (*within reasonable limits) plan. Our internet got cut off one day, we called Rogers and they told us that we "downloaded too much". We asked how much should we download and what the cap is, but we just got "not that much". We're with Bell now (which also has pretty bad customer support but at least we don't get arbitrarily disconnected).
3mbps for facebook... (Score:5, Funny)
Block the ads, and you can probably get away with 300 baud..
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!"
No difference in cars (Score:5, Insightful)
This is /., so we need some car comparisons...
My gf claims she needs a 250hp (at the rear wheel) V6 in her commuter car so she can "get on the highway easier." She compared 0-60 times for Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys.
I have friends that bought a huge SUV for when they drive to the ski slopes (they go 2-3x a year). A rented SUV would be much cheaper.
So why wouldn't the telcos use the same tactics when convincing their customers to purchase something that they really don't need? People are buying dual/quad core CPUs with 4GB of RAM just to surf the web and upload pics to flickr and facebook.
Re: (Score:2)
Rental car problems (Score:2)
I have friends that bought a huge SUV for when they drive to the ski slopes (they go 2-3x a year). A rented SUV would be much cheaper.
A lot of rental car places won't rent to people age 18-24 and/or won't allow driving the vehicle across state lines. And what's the Internet access analogy to a rental car? Ordering the work on optical disc from its publisher?
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: (Score:3, Informative)
You're seeing a 20% ATM cell tax. Because they use ATM to transfer your connection from the DSLAM to the routers. This will happen anytime you use ATM and IP.
What do they recommended for windows / ms update? (Score:2)
What do they recommended for windows / ms update?
At lest windows updates are not as bad as mac os x that are at the 800meg+ level.
Re:What do they recommended for windows / ms updat (Score:2)
The OS X *combo* updates tend to be large, but the incremental ones are small.
If you update frequently then you'll get the smaller patches. If you don't update for a very long time (or you do a nuke and pave and haven't saved the combo patcher before) you get hit with the big one.
The vast majority of OS X patches are nowhere near 800Mb.
They're right, 3mbps IS required for facebook (Score:4, Funny)
They're right, 3mbps IS required for facebook.
I mean, otherwise your torrents might slow to a crawl...
Totally misleading (Score:3, Informative)
My personal favorite is from AT&T which states you need 3mbps to use social networking sites like Facebook
That would be pretty funny if it were true, but no, it doesn't actually say that.
Try writing a real article instead of just completely making shit up.
The little chats even say "good for:" or "ideal for:".
The checkboxes clearly mean "if you want to do these sorts of things you probably want this amount of bandwidth", not "lesser connections are incapable of this".
It doesn't take a genius.
Re: (Score:2)
That would be pretty funny if it were true, but no, it doesn't actually say that.
Try writing a real article instead of just completely making shit up.
The little chats even say "good for:" or "ideal for:".
The checkboxes clearly mean "if you want to do these sorts of things you probably want this amount of bandwidth", not "lesser connections are incapable of this".
It doesn't take a genius.
While it is a bit on the "making it up side", you and I both know that most people will take that chart exactly that way. That they actually need 3 mbps to use "Social Networking".
Re:Totally misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
You clearly have a better understanding of the internet compared to someone who doesn't know any better. People look to advertising to guide them when they don't know what they want. If advertisements are saying "Hey, this 3mbps plan is great for social networking sites!" then that will stick in their mind when it comes to making a determination. The person making the ads understands their network, why shouldn't you trust their judgement unless they're shady? And if that's the case then why would you consider business with them in the first place?
You have to admit it's a bit silly (and a stretch) for Time Warner to even claim that you should consider the 15-30mbps plan if you're a big online shopper, or a 7mbps connection if you share a lot of photos (I guess if you share full resolution camera raws...)
Sure it's "ideal" to have that kind of bandwidth for whatever they're advertising. I mean hey if everyone just bought the best plan I'm sure their web experience would be amazing for that task. The problem is their advertisements are in fact misleading unknowing customers, and intentionally so, to get people who don't really understand the difference to pay for more and use less.
They would love it if everyone bought 30mbit plans and used it for email. They don't love it when people like me buy their plans and use it for what should be considered its intended purpose.
American problem again. (Score:3, Insightful)
"hands off busines" crap is costing you people time and money. because there are not enough tough regulations, corporations often can get away with scamming customers. to the extent that they dare put 'you cant sue us' clauses in contracts.
that "hands off business" thing really has to end. scamming, screwing people is not business, anyone using that excuse to defend such actions is a bastard.
Fun from Australia (Score:2)
http://cspcentral.com.au/2009/09/accc-executes-perfect-hit-on-telstra-optus-and-vodafone/ [cspcentral.com.au]
"misrepresents data allowances" and per meg up/down $ are very evil in Australia.
Remember when a T1 was broadband? (Score:3, Informative)
When I got started, 20+ years ago, a few large universities had T1's. That was by definition broadband - 1.5 mbps. Smaller schools often only had 2400 baud or in some cases faster telebit modems to hook up to the backbones.
In the 90's things started taking off and it was expected that every institution, except the very smallest, would have a T1. The biggest ones were hooked up by a T3. By the late 90's a few wealthy, well-connected individuals had their own private T1 at home.
And today? 1.5mbps does not meet most definitions of broadband. It's the backwaters. Isn't that amazing?
crimnals (Score:3, Informative)
[...] — seemingly almost criminally — [...]
If not misinterpreting in Canada it is criminal offence. To quote competitionbureau [competitionbureau.gc.ca] :
The false or misleading representations and deceptive marketing practices provisions of the Competition Act contain a general prohibition against all materially false or misleading representations. They also prohibit making performance representations which are not based on adequate and proper tests, misleading warranties and guarantees, false or misleading ordinary selling price representations, untrue, misleading or unauthorized use of tests and testimonials, bait and switch selling, double ticketing and the sale of a product above its advertised price. Further, the promotional contest provisions prohibit contests that do not disclose required information.
[...]
The Competition Act provides criminal and civil regimes to address false or misleading representations. Under both regimes, the Act prohibits the making, or the permitting of the making, of a representation to the public, in any form whatever, that is false or misleading in a material respect.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Every Western (and I am sure most Eastern :)) country has a similar law, the trouble is not legislative.
Perfectly reasonable (Score:3, Informative)
Most of those suggestions are perfectly reasonable if you want an optimal online experience. If you can't tolerate hiccups when streaming HD video, something that many consumers would call their ISPs to complain about, then yes, you are going to pay an arm and a leg for that convenience. The same goes for uploading albums of high megapixel images from your cameras - sharing pictures. You are going to pay an arm and a leg for that upload bandwidth.
It's not as though we're talking about medications here. It's not as though this is predatory. Anyone with this kind of money to dump just to avoid hiccups when streaming HD video of Dances with Douches from Hulu.com, but can't be bothered to do even minimal consumer research, is going to get exactly what they deserve. Consider it a tax on ignorance. It's a public good.
The biggest ISP lie of all (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest ISP lie of all is that 7mbps is a fast connection. Just because it's the fastest they offer, doesn't make it fast. Rather than arguing about how fast a connection one needs to watch videos, we ought to be storming the telco office with pitch forks and torches, demanding 100mbit to the home.
Re: (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
How about that maximum thing? (Score:3, Funny)
You do need a bit of speed for sniping on ebay auctions.
But how about that maximum thing when buying pills to "extend your tool?"
The better question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Guess who's got two thumbs and won't pay extra for visual voicemail. THIS GUY!
Re: (Score:2)
I, um, I can't see which way you're pointing.