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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.
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]
Yes I am starting an ISP, we have named our plans based on internal combustion engine technology (from slowest to fastest):
- Naturally Aspirated
- Venturi Affected Plenum Chamber
- Forced Induction (Blown)
- F1 (120% Volumetric Efficiency
Sign-ups seem slow...
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Pffft. My ISP goes to 11.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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.