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FCC's 'Nutrition Labels' For Broadband Show Speed, Caps, and Hidden Fees (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica article: The Federal Communications Commission today unveiled new broadband labels modeled after the nutrition labels commonly seen on food products. Home Internet service providers and mobile carriers are being urged to use the labels to give consumers details such as prices (including hidden fees tacked onto the base price), data caps, overage charges, speed, latency, packet loss, and so on. ISPs aren't required to use these labels. But they are required to make more specific disclosures as part of transparency requirements in the FCC's net neutrality order, which reclassified Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The FCC recommends that ISPs use these labels to comply with the disclosure rules and says use of the labels will act as a "safe harbor" for demonstrating compliance. However, ISPs can come up with their own format if they still make all the required disclosures in "an accurate, understandable, and easy-to-find manner," the FCC said today.
I'm so sick and tired of deceptive sales practices which are technically legal but involve all manner of legalism and obfuscation to sell a thing which differs conceptually from what the buyer actually gets.
This kind of thing should be required for any consumer contract advertising.
The advertisers should literally not care if its there if what they're selling in the big print actually matches what they deliver in the small print. The only way they should complain is if they are lying or intentionally deceiving consumers.
Even is ISPs are relatively transparent about what they sell you, it is always about maximum download and upload speed, and never about latency and quality of service. In fact, sales and first-tier support folks don't even know these terms, much less what their company's typical values are. In practice, a stable, low latency broadband connection with 15 Mbit/s cap gives you a better overall experience than a jerky, high latency connection which on paper tops out at 50 Mbit/s.
I am very glad the FCC is including these numbers by default to judge a provider's disclosure practices.
As an aside, test your connection at https://www.voipreview.org/spe... and see your latency, jitter and packet loss alongside the other metrics.
Capitalism starts to fail when companies spend most of their resources on trying to dupe customers rather than building a better mousetrap.
For example, my online banking requires me to select a "payment type" for each and every transaction I submit, which is typically each monthly bill.
I called customer support and asked to have it default to the payment type I use 99.9% of the time, but they said they'd put it in the wish-list and left me hanging.
The reason they do that is that the actual default is a goofy gimmick account that requires registering online and receiving spam (if you read the fine-print). They force you to see it.
They KNOW it's a time-waster to have the default payment type be the gimmicky one, but do it because they want their damned Spam-A-Tron promoted.
And there are other time-wasting gimmicks that I won't go into. It adds up. I'm not saying we should switch to socialized banking, but these capitalists sure are giving capitalism a bad name and make people more likely to agree to big-co regulations during elections.
Table-ized A.I.
For voice over IP, 128kbps with very low jitter and low latency will give ideal results. More bandwidth will neither help nor hurt.
For Netflix, it's all about about bandwidth, jitter doesn't matter at all and latency barely matters.
For ssh, it's all about latency. Bandwidth and jitter don't matter. (Assuming at least 28kbps).
It's a bit confusing for the average consumer. Heck, the average Slashdot reader doesn't know what jitter is.
Capitalism is about efficiently allocating the *market's* resources, not the resources of any particular particpant in the market. A prerequisite for this is information about the market. Obfuscation makes the market less efficient therefore it is anti-capitalist.