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Really Misleading Ads From Broadband Providers
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."
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.
Some companies add latency and lag to their lower end connections to get people to pay up for higher speed ones.
[citation needed]
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.