Broadband Firms in UK Must Ditch 'Misleading' Speed Ads (bbc.com) 69
An anonymous reader shares a report: Broadband firms will no longer be able to advertise their fast net services based on the speeds just a few customers get, from May next year. Currently ISPs are allowed to use headline speeds that only 10% of customers will actually receive. In future, adverts must be based on what is available to at least half of customers at peak times. It follows research that suggested broadband advertising can be misleading for consumers. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) looked into consumers' understanding of broadband speed claims and found that many were confused by headline speeds that they would never actually get in their own homes. The concerns were passed on to the Committees of Advertising Practice (Cap) which consulted with ISPs, consumer groups and Ofcom to find a better way to advertise fast net services. Most argued that the fairest and clearest way would be to use the average speeds achieved at peak time by 50% of customers.
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Minimum speed to what? My webserver connected to the internet via 9k6 modem?
Re: My solution (Score:1)
Uhh, Soros is a Holocaust surviving Jew that has givens tons to charity and has already given most of his wealth to charities and he aged - so your bogeyman actually seems like a great guy.
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It's easy to 'survive' if you help out the people doing the roundups
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
no solution (Score:2)
Soros was a *child* at the time, and is being held to an adult standard in this particular example.
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It's hard to imagine Karl Popper - who coined the term 'Open Society' which Soros named his Open Society Foundations after - having a similarly disconnected view of morality where it doesn't matter if you collaborate with evil because if you didn't do it someone else would.
of course it's hard to imagine, because the karl popper in your head is an adult karl popper, not a child; esp. not a child all fucked up by living in fucking nazi germany!
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It was Hungary were he was helping the Nazis round up Jews.
And he made his comments about guilt as an adult in 1998.
He was thirteen when he did it. I think I'd have known helping the Nazis round up my people was wrong when I was thirteen.
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You are another of these Russian troll cunts
Yeah right. I'm much more pro-US than I am pro Russia or China.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
E.g. I was pro US ABM deployments in Eastern Europe
https://politics.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
And nothing I said was antisemitic - in fact I criticized Soros for selling out his own people.
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9k6 modem....Someone FINALLY used the notation properly!
I am tired of all these flaming frat boys referring to things like "2K17" -- the year is not 2170!
And if you meant 2017, why not just say 2017? It's the same number of characters and sounds considerably less retarded.
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And if you meant 2017, why not just say 2017?
Because 2K Games finds it easier to obtain and enforce exclusive rights in the "2K17" mark.
It took so long (Score:4, Insightful)
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In Australia the debate is only just starting.
Hopefully we will follow the mothercountry, and have only started to refund from plans that had impossible to get speeds.
Here is international fimdings. Go for it. .
Re:It took so long (Score:4, Insightful)
They should force ISPs to reveal where there is congestion on their networks. The national speed might be good, but in your area there is oversubscription and no intention to do any upgrades so what you get is much lower.
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That would be sensible. My ISP gets negative feedback online because some customers are getting lower performance at peak times.
My experience is that I pay for a 200/20 asynchronous connection and steam game downloads sustain 223Mbps (e.g. downloading the 110GB of games I bought in yesterday's sale) and my Youtube uploads (50-70GB at a time) sustain 22Mbps.
So the online complaints are at best representative of a specific location.
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These twaddles are as old as ISPs. I just wonder why it took so long.
Most ISPs are advertising the RAW carrier bit-rate rather than the actual net data bit-rate.
DSL Provider show you ATM bit-rate. You can roughly cut 10-12% for the real BPS. And it still represents the raw data rate between your modem and the DSLAM. Even when you get optimal link there, the local collect loop is either deliberately throttled or saturated. By the time your data can travel to or from outside your ISPs internal network, it is already diminished.
Getting VDSL2 here advertised as up-to 100up/30down MBPs.
Lines has 0 loss, 0 CRC, and talks at 90/25 MBs. Even if it is encapsulated in an ATM transmission with 10% loss. That make it still like 80 Down / 25 Up.
In reality ISP is throttling it to 25-30 Down 20 Up because their fiber to the central has not enough capacity in my area.
Sheepples here don't care as long as they can go to Facebook to post their pathetic lolcats.
Good hope some advertising regulators pay attention. Was about time they did.
Well to answer your first questions is that this is the UK, nothing gets done until enough people complain.
The answer to your second question is that advertising exactly what bandwidth is would be far to difficult for the average mouth breather to understand, and our mouth-breathers (Chavs) are far better educated than the average American mouth-breather (redneck, trailer-trash or Trump voter). Most people dont understand the difference between upload speeds and download speeds on ADSL let alone the intr
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Now if only they'd be forced to advertise their upstream speeds too. This tends to be the biggest bottleneck and pain point, and also the hardest information to find. This was one of the reasons I originally went with BT when FTTC was rolled out in my neighbourhood (and I hated myself everyday for being their customer) was because I knew I'd get 20mbs upstream. Compared with other 'fast' providers like Virgin, this is actually very good. Virgin BTW buried this information somehwere on their website, and
Home of Poet Ewan McTeagle (Score:1)
Custermers, who are these people? (Score:4, Funny)
The lady at Comcast told me she's not having any speed or connectivity problems.
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Apparently it stands for Water Displacement Formula #40. And yes, he didn't perfect it until the 40th try. Science, bitches.
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Apparently it stands for Water Displacement Formula #40..
Then why didn't the inventor call it WDF40?
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WD40 stands for 'Water Dispersant #40'
The first 39 didn't work that well.
Destruction of an economic model (Score:1)
What is it about Europe? (Score:4)
Is there something fundamentally wrong with their systems of government?
Everybody knows that "Up To xx Mb/s" means "you should almost, maybe, sometime, perhaps, likely, on occasion, once in a blue moon...."
Now they are trying to change things in a terrible, terrible way for ISPs - taking away hope and replacing it with fact - OK, at least 1/2 the time... but still...
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Why is it that European governments seem to actually act on behalf of their citizens?
Proportional representation in parliaments is a good start. That means that a party can't just screw their people over just because they are the lesser evil. People can still vote for the third or fourth party without feeling as if their vote is wasted.
(That is such a silly notion, even in a two party system the politicians will notice if they lost a percentage of the vote to someone on the fringe and adapt their politics to get those votes back.)
The way EU is structured also leads to a situation where a si
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So when it comes to anti-trust (I know that's not what's being talked about here, but bear with me), the USA only considers it a problem when there's a negative PRICE impact on the consumer. The fundamental, underlying philosophy is that low prices are the greatest good, so monopoly is bad only insofar as it impacts prices. This is why Apple lost an anti-trust suit despite being a small player: they raised prices, and colluded with publishers because publishers felt like they were embarking on an unsustaina
It's not just the mega-ISPs, either ... (Score:3)
When we moved to rural southern Ohio in 2008, the ONLY option for "broadband" available to us was the iLEC's DSL, which it advertised as offering "up to 1 megabit" speeds (although I never saw downloads faster than about 680kbps, with just over 100kbps up).
Then the rental house we lived in was struck by lightning, which trashed the ISP's DSL modem, of course (along with a bunch of our own electronics - thank you, renter's insurance!). A chat with the tech they sent to test and replace the modem revealed that the iLEC capped DSL rates at 768/112 kbps at the DSLAM, so, in fact, the "up to 1 megabit" claim was a flat-out lie by the iLEC, Horizon. There's no other way to characterize it than as a deliberate, knowing misrepresentation.
Here in the USA, that's entirely legal - and the new, Trumpified FCC sure isn't going to do anything to change that.
Lucky us ...
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Did you ask for credits for the misled speeds?
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antdude inquired:
Did you ask for credits for the misled speeds?
Again: legal in this country. No recourse available, no compensation required.
Smell that? It's the aroma of FREEDOM!
So don't blame the FCC if it smells like dogshit to you ...
That was fast (Score:2)
They knew exactly what they were doing.
Forget speed; Teach them what "unlimited" means (Score:1)