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How Broad is Broadband?
Photon01 writes "The Register reports that UK ISP NTL have lost, in a ruling that their advertisement of their 128k broadband service as 'High Speed Broadband Internet' is misleading.
This is despite it clearly meeting the technical definitions of broadband internet.
Apparently 128k broadband is not broad enough." My first cable modem was only 256k. It wasn't blazingly fast but after being stuck on dialup it was heaven, and I imagine 128k wouldn't be so bad for a single household.
well, it's all realative. back in the mid 90's, dual channel ISDN was amazingly fast, and is what everyone wanted for their businesses. now a days, we know that ISDN isn't all that hot, and then the ADSL are to be considered lower end broadband. so how broad is broadband? well for me, right now, it's about 800k/sec sustained download from sunsite. kinda hot.
Here on the UAH campus network, They say it's broadband, but we get the speed and relability of dial up. I guess they think if you get a static IP and connect though an ethernet jack it's broadband.
I got ADSL myself, at 376kbs down and 128kbs up. It's not very broad for a broadband (indeed, some argue that ADSL can't be defined as broadband), but I picked it for quite another reason then bandwidth; I'm always on. And when you're used to pay for the minute, that's pretty darn important - I've saving about 50% each month compared to a dial-up connection. I would say that for my use, thats more important than the speed with wich I can D/L over P2P.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
I'd say the problem was that it was marketed as high speed broadband. While 128Kbps may technically be broadband, I don't think many people would consider it to be particularly high speed.
It's a terrible precedent when marketers and lawyers can define a technical term like "broadband". I wonder if they're going to define "baseband" for us as well?
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
They were advertising "high speed" broadband internet access. It may well be broadband, but it certainly isn't "high speed" broadband.
"Low speed broadband" would have been more appropriate, but of course, they would've made their offering pale in comparison with real "high speed" broadband, so greed took over and caused them to advertise in a misleading fashion.
Maybe it's broadband, but it's not what I would call high speed broadband...
There already is an 'octane' rating for internet access. It is called 'kbps'.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
When are people going to get some god damn common sense? People always want technical, detailed labels on stuff defining things that everyone knows.
"Cigarettes may cause cancer."
"California Recognizes that burning gasoline may pollute the environment."
"Warning, Coffee May Be Hot"
How about a whole list of stuff?
So when a company decides to use the techinal term, (a REAL technical term) people get all pissed off because it doesn't quite meet thier own made up definition. When are people going to wake up and realize that labels aren't going to save you, and the government isn't going to build a private padded room for everyone to live in?
Bits or bytes?
Burstable to that speed with a (monthly) cap or is sustained speed allowed?
X/sec to where? Their router? Their ftp server in your city? cdrom.com? slashdot.org? Uptime: 5 nines? Whos problem? Customer? Telco? Bandwidth people?
'Demarc': edge of NSPs router? street? telco demarc? Network side of CPE router? Whole router?
etc, etc, etc.
It would be fair to ask NTL to drop the High Speed claim, 128kbps isn't that fast, but it is technically broadband - by the ASAs' own admittion! Thereby having "broadband access from £14.99" instead of "high speed broadband....", but no this is too much like a good idea.
Mind you doing things that define common sense isn't new to the ASA. A couple of years ago they banded a car newspaper/magazine ad because it had a blurred background and gave the impression of breaking the speed limit (the car was actually standind still with no driver as I remember). To further prove that they are a bunch of silly people several months later didn't ban a similar ad by another car maker - doh! In general the ASA do do a good job, but it's at times like these you wonder if they have the heads screwed on.
Dispite the technical meaning of the word, people assume broadband = fast to begin with. "High Speed Broadband Internet" indicates you're selling fast broadband. Advertising it as "High Speed Internet" *or* as "Broadband Internet" would work, because it is considerably faster than a dial-up line. But when you stick then together you expect a broadband connection faster than the average, not the slowest of slow broadband.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Maybe the company hiked the prices when the system moved from "beta testing" to "production" state, and the users decided the new price was too high?
Ah... advertising law is a wonderful field where wordsmiths clash.
In many cases a copywriter manipulates language to make a dubious clash and then the advertised company gets sued by a competitor. The plaintiff lawyer has fun attacking it with reference to professional and consumer opinion (is Slashdot professional or consumer) and the defending lawyer has to say, it wasn't dubious, people are used to dubious advertising and take it with a pinch of salt and anyway dubious advertising doesn't effect their decisions - all in one go.
A lawyer (or lawyers) found that the term 'broadband' is misleading as used in reference to 128kbps. He didn't define it.
Since consumers would probably equate 'broadband' with 'quick', I think the finding is reasonable - 128 isn't quick.
A few years ago, sitting in front of my 1200/75 MODEM, I was in awe of those with 33.8kbps devices... Today, with my 512/128kbps connection, I still wish it was faster.
The difference, apart from my own impatience, is the content that forms the dominant delivery paradigm. In 1990, high-bandwidth content was not in the same universe as what we will consider to be high-bandwidth content in 2020. Thankfully, the days of ASCII porn are over...
If you choose to determine the nature of broadband by the speed of the connection, you need a sliding scale, linked to what content developers and users use it for - almost an Internet Societal Norm - as I think that speeds and the size of content 'atoms' will continue to grow.
Of course, I make these comments from a position of complete ignorance...
Well, broadband *is* the opposite of baseband. Broadband is a modulated analog signal, while baseband is a digital signal.
;)
Ethernet is baseband. Despite the fact that Ethernet is from 10mbps-1gbps, it is NOT broadband because there's no modulation/demodulation that occurs in the signal.
Broadband != fast. 56K dialup modem is broadband.
My journal has hot
I remember when I got my first modem (a 1200bps) that 9600bps and 14400bps were considered "high speed". The USRobotics modems were even branded as "HST" with the HS meaning "high speed".
Then 19200 and later 28800 came out and suddenly 14400 modems were accessible to the masses and they weren't considered to be high speed anymore. However some 14400 modems still were labelled "high speed", presumably to attract people to make the switch from the lowly speed of 2400.
Then it happened all over again when 56K came out.
The one thing that was different is that I can't recall hearing of anybody getting sued over it. Probably because most modem buyers back then were more of the nerdy types and weren't fooled by cheap marketing gimmicks like sticking the words "high speed" on the box!
As for broadband, it's probably best left as a relative term. In many countries, 128K may be the best that one can get, unless one wishes to spend thousands of dollars.