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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."
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?
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
Some companies add latency and lag to their lower end connections to get people to pay up for higher speed ones.
[citation needed]
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.
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.
In the US we are still in stone age compared to 3rd world countries like Korea when it comes to bandwidth.
That phrase... I don't think it means what you think it means...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
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.
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.
You clearly have a better understanding of the internet compared to someone who doesn't know any better. People look to advertising to guide them when they don't know what they want. If advertisements are saying "Hey, this 3mbps plan is great for social networking sites!" then that will stick in their mind when it comes to making a determination. The person making the ads understands their network, why shouldn't you trust their judgement unless they're shady? And if that's the case then why would you consider business with them in the first place?
You have to admit it's a bit silly (and a stretch) for Time Warner to even claim that you should consider the 15-30mbps plan if you're a big online shopper, or a 7mbps connection if you share a lot of photos (I guess if you share full resolution camera raws...)
Sure it's "ideal" to have that kind of bandwidth for whatever they're advertising. I mean hey if everyone just bought the best plan I'm sure their web experience would be amazing for that task. The problem is their advertisements are in fact misleading unknowing customers, and intentionally so, to get people who don't really understand the difference to pay for more and use less.
They would love it if everyone bought 30mbit plans and used it for email. They don't love it when people like me buy their plans and use it for what should be considered its intended purpose.
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
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"