Slashdot Mirror
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."
Apparently I need a faster connection to use sla
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!
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
"Max"
"Max Plus"
"Max Turbo"
Do these people even know what the word "maximum" means?
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.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I have Time Warner Cable, with Turbo. I use internet extensively, online streaming like pandora, netflix, youtube, and skype. Not only do I have to pay Time Warner for the internet connection I also have to pay for all the services like netflix & skype (out). In the US we are still in stone age compared to 3rd world countries like Korea when it comes to bandwidth. We supposedly have the best technology & brain power, but we are still short when it comes to servicing 200 mil people with cheap and fast internet. Will breaking cable monopoly help? or it the problem deeper than that? I pay roughly $600 a year for internet a utility that I use for average 8hrs a day. That is pretty steep compared to electricity which I use 24hrs a day, I never have any voltage fluctuations or power outs. But with internet I experience drop in BW or even outage for long periods of time.
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 ask for better upstream....
The really sad part is that they want to sell you a super fast Internet connection but they sure as hell don't want you to use it. Most ISP's are slapping bandwidth caps which are all over the place. I believe comcast has a 250GB cap which is fair but I'm on Rogers (up in Canada) with a shitty low cap of 60 GB's. That's probably fine for most people but I actually use the internet so I need to be careful. It's just more deceit to get you to pay more for less.
Block the ads, and you can probably get away with 300 baud..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I'd say it has more to do with the continual bloat of the net rather than the link to the router at those speeds.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Some companies add latency and lag to their lower end connections to get people to pay up for higher speed ones.
[citation needed]
My favorite of these were the old Comcast ads.
The ones that said something alone the lines of " Unlimited internet! Download music and more!"
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
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.
No sig today...
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.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They're right, 3mbps IS required for facebook.
I mean, otherwise your torrents might slow to a crawl...
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.
Amen. I don't know about computer games, but on XBOX Live one person in the match is selected as the host/server. So they have to upstream one copy of everything to each player. You'd better hope they have FIOS.
I don't see any technical reason not to offer symmetric packages. I've always assumed it's to curb P2P *grumble*
"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.
Read radical news here
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.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
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.
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?
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.
[...] — seemingly almost criminally — [...]
If not misinterpreting in Canada it is criminal offence. To quote competitionbureau :
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.
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 cancel. But I don't think that qualifies -- the damage isn't irreversible until you empty the trash, which will give you a very definite "are you sure" message.
But may favorite is... acidentally visiting a website with a drive-by malware downloader, or downloading and trying to install a file with malware undetectable by any common antimalware.
That's fair -- though most malware does show a popup. So, most of these can be mitigated with, again, "read popups".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
And I'll assume that that Counter-Strike server was on a dedicated server with a dedicated Internet connection, unlike the MW2 server, which was hosted by one of your peers. You can have the best Internet connection in the world, but if the server your connected to has a 56k-like Internet connection, you'll only get that.
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.
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.)
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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?"
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 capping you at the head end, you can always test this by uncapping your cable modem by sending it a different set of operational parameters, but you will get in trouble for doing so if you're caught.
And I'm fairly certain that latency throttling (for e.g. video games) isn't something you can do with DOCSIS modems so long as you aren't exceeding the bandwidth limitations that your modem has been given by your ISP. That said, the conspiracy theory introduced by this post isn't true, at least not for most cable ISP's in the US.
I imagine with DSL, fiber, or some other kind of connection this may be possible, but I don't know.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I know ISPs will fuck with your bandwidth, but...
Actually, lag injection doesn't sound that far-fetched given the quality of most ISPs.
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Has anyone seen an ad from a broadband provider that wasn't misleading?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
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.
Comment of the year
I see two main culprits these days similar to what you mention:
1: A lot of web pages are brimming with ads, usually Flash based stuff, which can make a page go from a few kilobytes into the megabytes. Since pages tend to render only after the ads are slung, the whole page ends up dependant on the ad servers, which are usually at the absolutely lowest bandwidth possible, so even though a site may have a fast connection, connections are dependant on a third party server.
2: The shell games with throttling some ISPs do.
So, what is a good solution? The first can be done on a single platform using Privoxy or a similar ad-dropping proxy for general use. Browsers can also have AdBlock or a similar add-on installed which can dynamically update from a service like EasyList. You can also block at the router (Tomato has functionality for this) ad sites so every machine on your LAN benefits.
Dealing with the second is harder. You will need to find a decent VPN service that has encrypted tunneling (PPTP, OpenVPN, SOCKS, PPP over ssh, pick your poison), and go with that. Another advantage is that if the ISP is using Phorm or some MITM software to inject ads, they are completely locked out, so your web pages won't be tampered with. Of course you can use TOR, but the question is about bandwidth performance, not security, and even though TOR provides good security, a commercial VPN provider provides decent [1] security, and good performance.
[1]: Check your VPN provider out closely. It is better to find they do have a logging policy of a few days for security reasons than find they don't have a policy at all (thus can keep permanent records of what customers do), or that they keep records a lot longer than they really should. You are buying service from them to protect your privacy, not to have another party able to make a behavioral profile on you. Also, it tends to be better to find a VPN provider closer to you net-wise, than one in another country, just to reduce latency.
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.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The US is where Internet was born and, consequently, where it is the most developed. Yet prices for ADSL connections are way higher than in my country (Romania). I admit, minimum wage is way higher in the US, but still. Besides, prices for almost anything else, from food to clothing to electronics, are way lower in the US.
Long story short, a 20mbps adsl connection here is EUR12.5, meaning around $17.99. Taxes included. So.... umm.... what gives?