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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.
Dunno about the rest of you, but my "broadband" connection is only a few millimeters wide...
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside" -- Calvin
This is what comes of marketting departments taking a technical term and redefining it. The opposite of broadband is not narrowband, but baseband (eg the defunct V.35).
What can be done to stop sales and marketting (and politicians) from diluting perfectly good technical terms.
how many brands can a broadbrand brand if a broadband could broad brands?
When you buy gasoline, the octane rating is Required by law to be posted. A similar system of 'Broadband Octane', so to speak, would allow consumers to more effectively make decisions on internet access.
In addition, there seems to be a growing trend of 'broadband' carriers who are slowly jacking down the bandwidth to each individual, either by packing in more consumers on a main line, or forcing the hardware to lower rates. In any case, more unsolicited disclosure would be welcomed.
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.
13.21 Gbps OC-255
10 Gbps OC-192
4.976 Gbps OC-96
2.488 Gbps OC-48, STS-48
1.866 Gbps OC-36
1.244 Gbps OC-24
933.12 Mbps OC-18
622.08 Mbps OC-12, STS-12
466.56 Mbps OC-9
155.52 Mbps OC-3, STS-3
100 Mbps CDDI, FDDI, Fast Ethernet, Category 5 cable
51.84 Mbps OC-1, STS-1
44.736 Mbps T-3, DS-3 North America
34.368 Mbps E-3 Europe
20 Mbps Category 4 cable
16 Mbps Fast Token Ring LANs
10 Mbps Thin Ethernet, category 3 cable, cable modem
8.448 Mbps E-2 Europe
6.312 Mbps T-2, DS-2 North America
6.144 Mbps Standard ADSL downstream
4 Mbps Token Ring LANs
3.152 Mbps DS-1c
2.048 Mbps E-1, DS-1 Europe
1.544 Mbps ADSL, T-1, DS-1 North America
128 Kbps ISDN
64 Kbps DS-0, pulse code modulation
56 Kbps 56flex, U.S. Robotics x2 modems,
33.6 Kbps 56flex, x2 modem communications rate
28.8 Kbps V.34, Rockwell V.Fast Class modems
20 Kbps Level 1 cable, minimum cable data speed
14.4 Kbps V.32bis modem, V.17 fax
9600 bps modem speed circa early 1990s
2400 bps modem speed circa 1980s
Units of Measurement
bit = smallest unit of digital information, i.e. ones & zeros
byte = a set of bits
bps = bits per second
Kbps = kilobits per second =1000 bits per second
Mbps = Million bits per second =1,000,000 bits per second
Gbps = Gigabits per second = 1,000,000,000 (one billion) bits per second
Tbps = Terabits per second = 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) bits per second
(Network speed is mesured in 1000 units, memory and storage space in 1024 units)
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.
Just remember that to the average user, a 128k ISDN line with relatively low latiency is going to feel much faster at their normal tasks than a faster connection with higher pings, such as satellite or even some cable modems. Broadband should include more than just throughput, it should be the sum of many factors.
2 definitions found
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:
From WordNet (r) 1.7
broadband
adj 1: of or relating to or being a communications network in which
the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple
simultaneous signals (as for voice or data or video)
2: responding to or operating at a wide band of frequencies; "a
broadband antenna" [syn: wideband]
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (09 FEB 02)
broadband
A transmission medium capable of supporting a
wide range of frequencies, typically from audio up to video
frequencies. It can carry multiple signals by dividing the
total capacity of the medium into multiple, independent
bandwidth channels, where each channel operates only on a
specific range of frequencies.
See also baseband.
(1995-05-09)
Someone should tell these guys about it. What they advertise as "ultra high speed internet access" is actually a great 100 Mbit LAN connection...to the other residents of the apartment complex. Connection to the internet? Capped at 64 kbps. Yes, you read that right... 64 kilobits per second. As in, slightly faster than your 56K modem. On a good day.
I tried to call them on it, but the apartment won't take responsibility ("we're not the network guys, we just pay for it") and the actual ISP won't either ("we just provide what they pay us for"). It infuriates me because I think the ISP is trying to pull a fast one on the apartment complex and the complex just doesn't know any better. Even the head technician claims that 64k is two to three times faster than 56k cause it's full-duplex (doesn't help my download speed) and ethernet means reduced latency (still doesn't help my big downloads).
Someone get Cogentco to come to Utah. Now *that's* what I consider "ultra high-speed internet!"
It's not how much you have have, it's how you use it.
Broadband means it's a communications channel divided into multiple chunks. Each person on a cablemodem connection uses a different freqency range on the same cable, that makes the cable broadband. The opposite of broadband is baseband, that's where the base comes from in 100BaseT.
If you divide a 2400 baud modem among several users in that way, it can be called broadband too even though each user only have a few hundred bps.
Jason
ProfQuotes
It's not clear how this term became associated with DSL. Early on, DSL was referred to as "data over voice". (This came from the old "data under voice" system, which sent very low data rate signals for alarms and such over lines also carrying voice, using a frequency band somewhere below 100Hz.) Both of those terms are now obsolete.
DSL has no DC component (you can put it through a capacitor and it works just fine) so technically, it is "broadband". But that has nothing to do with the data rate.
From a regulatory standpoint, what we need is this: It is deceptive advertising to advertise an "up to" speed without showing, with equal or greater prominence, a guaranteed minimum speed. This rule should apply generally to any advertising that specifies some numeric measure of goodness.
Dont forget about all the people who have the most expensive and lowest speed DSL, iDSL. DSL over ISDN.
I was stuck on iDSL on covad for 2 years till they fixed our phone lines.
Good points, faster than modem, almost 3x. And ping was great, 20ms to all hops in Seattle. (Low ping bastard for games)
So it was doable. And compared to ISDN which you had to bind the channels together, and dial out, was a snap, static IPs and never a disconnect.
Total cost, about 400 bux for a modem, 100 bux a month service.
Now YOU bitch about the price of high speed DSL.
Gbit Ethernet doesn't function over Cat-5(e), as Cat-5 maxes out at 100Mhz full-duplex and Cat-5e maxes out at 350Mhz full-duplex. For full-speed Gbit Ethernet over copper you need Cat-6.
Another one I see that he left out is ATM - which works at the same speed as an OC-3 (155.52 Mbit/s). Still... a pretty complete listing, over-all.
/dev/random
I remember reading a while back about the FCC's definition of Broadband. One idea holds that broadband should be fast enough to support streaming video at VHS quality which is supposedly 500 kb/s. In theory if you can support streaming video, basically anything can be provided over the internet assuming that it is processed on a remote server. However, I would still like my personal fiber optic cable.
I love it how they never put in the units. "Yes I have blazing 640K speed!" 640K what? 640 bits (or a nibble perhaps) per year?
Of course, bps (bits per second) is extremely misleading too. Why not be honest and saying: "64K" bytes per second.
This is, 8bits/char plus the two extra bits due to parity and other information.
Don't make numbers go naked! Put units on them!
Side note: 2 bits == nibble
Well, where do we start? Sure, it isn't "high speed broadband". So I was agreeing with the judges decision. Afterall, here in .au, we actually care about the "consumer" (hate that word), and if some lousy business lies to you, we sic ACCC (Asutralian competition and consumer commision) onto them.
But then found out that the lawyers were arguing it wasn't "broadband". ie, some stupid slime has stolen physicist's language, and is trying to force change in terminology through law. They didn't have a beef with the "high speed" part, instead they chose to pick on "broadband".
I am involved in the videogames industry. In this generation of consoles, there has been a lot of controversy on the definition of broadband, since there's not a standard on the requirements for any given game and there's not a clear way for the user and the developer to know if they are met beforehand.
This causes a big problem for everybody. Developers have an inherent need to limit their bandwidth requirements and perform a lot of tests to reduce network problems, and it can really influence gameplay design; technical support and marketing can be a headache for the publisher and the experience for the user can be very frustrating if there is a simple latency problem, even if the bandwidth is high.
Every "broadband" user in this case says: "but I have broadband! Why can't I play?". Latency and bandwidth are very complex things to explain, and many factors can affect the videogame experience negatively. (number of hops, type of interface, firewalls, NATs, network traffic, just to name a few)
I performed extensive tests with the Dreamcast, the PS2, the GameCube and the Xbox, I can say not many games really require more than a 64K connection, but in many cases, while even the bandwidth of a 56K modem could suffice, a specific game may have a problem with the latency associated. That's why some games are labeled as "broadband only". Of course, it doesn't guarantee the connection will meet the game's requirements, but it minimizes the problem somewhat.
As it is, we used to have a better way of classifying the connection speed on dial-up modems. The diversity on interfaces and protocols (xDSL, Cable, WLAN, etc.) just render the term "broadband" useless.
I remember Ken Kutaragi (Playstation's main designer) saying something in a conference a couple years ago that went along the lines: "you call 1.5 Megabits/sec 'broadband'? But that's about the speed of a CDROM!" I wish Kutaragi extended the analogy to latency using CDROM seek and access time too.
We need a better way to refer to a modern Internet connection, period.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
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?
My home ADSL is 1.5Mb.
Where I work (the R&D hub of the Air Force) has OC-12s and -48s and who knows what else, coming out of its ears.
But the link from inside to outside goes through so many filters and firewalls that reading email, loading a web page, or trying to download the latest security patch goes far far faster at home than at work.
(And it's not competing traffic from the rest of the base's inhabitants, either. Trying to pull stuff off the net in the middle of the night when nobody else is there isn't any faster. Grumble.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Last time I heard, a n(yi)bble was 4 bits. Has something changed in the last fifteen years? (And yes, there is some precedent to say that it varies, but 4 bits is the most common usage...)
--ZS
-- sigs cause cancer.
In Sweden, my friend lives in appartment block, and they got a 100Mbps broadbend network installed free as the company wanted to test the technology. (They pay about $20 a month to use it).
Thay had a meeting about it, to discuss what people thought of it, the company explained that other appartments were having 10Mbps lines installed.
Being Swedish, they decided to have a vote, and democratically decided to change the network to 10Mbps so they would have the same as everyone else.
Only in Sweden...
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
It's whether 128k can be described as high speed broadband. It can't. 512k is normal broadband, 128k is their low cost, low speed broadband option and I welcome the fact that it exists but it certainly is not high speed broadband.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Technology does. Broadband is a kind of link that can do multiple things. Like DSL, there is both data and voice riding over the same wire, just in seperate bands. This is as opposed to technology called baseband, where the whole bandwidth of teh link is used for one task. Ethernet would be an example of baseband. It is perfectly possable to have really slow broadband (like say DSL with only 64k upstream) or really fast baseband (like 10Gb ethernet).
The reason why broadband is an exciting technology to the home user is that you can get data over an existing technology like cable or phone lines. Since it travels in a seperate band, it doesn't interfere with your existing service, and since it is part of the same link, there is no requirement to run an additonal connection to your house.
However it has no bearing on speed. My external link is broadband, but only 640kbit/sec. My internal links are all baseband, and old technology at that, but still run at 100mbit/sec.
"Enlarge your broadband now! No pills, no pumps! Up to 4 inches thick! Guaranteed!"
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Why do you think they call it broadband?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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
Latency.
An interesting term.
You're most likely getting less latency on your ISDN than people do on their various *DSLs because of the crap way that almost every ILEC implements the CMUX->3rd party ISP transition.
ISDN's theoretical minimum SRTT is ~30ms (15ms end to end.) This will vary based on your distance from the switch, and the router you're calling's distance from its switch, and the number of switches in the middle. Remember, ISDN is circuit switched, so once you've established a Q.931 call you 'own' that 64 kilobits of bandwidth until you hang it up. There's no contention (unless the router at the other end is being hammered by something and its CPU is peaking, but that's not a physical constraint.)
DSL is usually sold by LECs to ISPs in the form of an ATM circuit that plugs into an L2TP LNS (concentrator.) A PPPoE/PPPoA connection is then established between the subscriber and the LEC's DSLAM, which then, acting as an LAC (l2tp client) forwards the circuit through the ATM network into the ISP's LNS.
The issue here is analogous, but not identical, to the 'engaged signal' problem which dial ISPs had (and still have.) You only purchase so much capacity from your LEC. When the subscriber:capacity ration exceeds 1:1, you will inevitably get contention. In the circuit-switched world of dial, this results in busy signals. In the cell-switched DSL/ATM world, this results in contention for backhaul bandwidth, which causes an increase in ping times. In theory (assuming zero contention,) any DSL will be much faster than ISDN.
I'll give you some (real world) examples. On my home, majorly oversubscribed, ADSL line (which is currently unladen,) a traceroute yields this:
traceroute to 203.24.47.212 (203.24.47.212), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 172.18.0.254 0.548 ms 0.231 ms 0.225 ms
2 202.59.108.248 1.092 ms 0.754 ms 6.590 ms
3 202.59.104.1 51.111 ms 41.659 ms 89.890 ms
The first 2 hops are the internal and external firewalls, respectively (yes, I am sad.) The third hop is the LNS at my ISP who shall remain nameless but is easily identifiable with a whois @whois.apnic.net.
The 2 megabit SDSL connection I've got at work, into our own equipment (I work at a small company who owns its own SDSL infrastructure, essentially a LEC in their own right,) the traceroute yields this.
traceroute to 203.24.47.212 (203.24.47.212), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 203.x.y.1 0.805 ms 0.856 ms 0.705 ms
2 203.x.z.1 1.577 ms 1.298 ms 1.184 ms
3 10.144.0.13 2.583 ms 2.682 ms 2.084 ms
4 203.x.a.97 3.097 ms 1.989 ms 2.064 ms
Where, again, 203.x.y.1 (I don't plan to identify where I work in this post, because that path is fraught with danger) is the switch which separates the engineering subnet from management, wireless, and phone (which is almost invariably at 85% utilisation due to the broadcast nature of 3com NBXes). 203.x.z.1 is the SDSL router (a flowpoint 2200 if you're interested), and 10.144.0.13 is the DSLAM. There is no backhaul ATM network in this scenario because we don't have resellers.
Finally, off a friend's ISDN connection:
traceroute to 203.89.25.72 (203.89.25.72), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 203.13.113.105 0.996 ms 0.855 ms 0.870 ms
2 203.13.114.255 30.416 ms 31.422 ms 30.518 ms
This network is less complex. 203.13.114.255 is the ISDN router at the ISP end. The link is unused at the moment as he's in the process of transitioning everything to an ADSL connection (oh, the irony.)
The reason your pings go to shit in a game is because you're trying to stuff too much data down your 64k line, and the buffer in your modem/router is filling up. As this happens, it takes extra time for each packet to get from the end of the queue to the start thereof. Your pings go to crap and you get kicked off the server.
Bandwidth and latency have an interesting relationship.
You're doing it wrong.
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...
The "10 bits in a byte" rule originally applied to parity and synchronization bits in a stream. Modern streams no longer use straight parity per byte but rather a CRC per packet, and synchronization happens less often, but "10 bits in a byte" is still valid because of protocol overhead such as IP addresses, port numbers, packet sequence numbers, evil bits, etc.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
"Broadband" referrs to the modulation of multiple signals on different frequencies over the same physical wire.
Contrasted with "baseband", which is the simple placement of an electrical signal on a wire.
Ethernet uses a baseband method of signaling. Hence the technical terminology "100 Base TX" 100 Megabit, baseband signaling. The TX, I forget what that represends.
Baseband signaling is trivial to interpret...an ethernet adapter only needs to be aware of three states on the wire...0, 1, and null. As opposed to broadband, where the adapter needs to be aware of the different signal levels and frequencies and pick the right channel from the wire to modulate/demodulate over.
How can a lawyer define a technical term? "Broadband" has been misused because DSL/Cable are implimentations of broadband, but broadband signaling is not implicitly faster (or slower) than baseband signaling. There is no debate over what "broadband" means, it is explicitly defined in the world of electrical engineering, and has been for many years.
WTF do the lawyers think they can get off doing?