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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.
It says it guarantees Safe Harbor if they use the FCC format. What they will likely do is adopt the format and then try to weasel the information actually included and then claim Safe Harbor.
Making it a "suggestion" and offering the carrot of Safe Harbor is about avoiding being instantly sued for issuing a mandate that the carriers don't want them to have the right to give in the first place.
I'm pretty sure they're already being sued in as many ways as possible to stop their having any authority in the first place, I vaguely remember reading something about it.
It seems fairly clever to me I just hope the FCC is ready for the manipulative ways it will be implemented (which will obviously be in as useless a way as possible by the carriers).
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.
There's a "COG (Ceritified Organically-Grown)" symbol on the broadband. It's a bit of a lie, though..."Freerange broadband" just means the broadband lives in a 2'x2' cage rather than a 1'x1' cage. It doesn't mean your broadband gets to see the sun and eat bugs outside.
I'm hoping for a high Fiber ISP.......
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.
quit shoveling the bullshit in the first place so such things aren't needed.
set the monthly price. set the data speed, down and up. set the modem monthly rental rate.. that's it. no quotas, no bogus fees, no termination fees, no 'setup' fees, no term length contracts, no selling/giving our info away, no snooping/sniffing our data streams, no ad injections, etc etc
a simple-no-bullshit-all-i-want-is-a-big-dumb-pipe-without-getting-buttfucked-by-the-isp plan.
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.
Should include:
ISP packet inspection practices
Ports blocked
Protocols blocked
Prioritization and/or throttling policies
Double NATing
IPv6 availability
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
This is great and all, but in most people's lives their internet access bill is a small part of their monthly expenses - let's apply the same logic to something that has a greater impact on a person's financial future: student loans. Imagine a one-page document that students must sign each school year that itemizes their borrowing like so: Name: Total amount borrowed to date: New amount to be borrowed this school year: Total amount owed at end of current school year: Grace period before loan repayment starts: Grace period if student chooses to leave school before matriculation: Estimated monthly payment amount (based on previous debt level): Estimated NEW monthly payment (based on new debt taken on): Number of monthly payments until loan(s) paid off: Total of all estimated loan payments (principle and interest), assuming no pre-payments made, for old loan balance): Total of all estimated loan payments (principle and interest), assuming no pre-payments made, for NEW loan balance: Kids signing up for student loans have no idea what their payments will be, that is a much, much bigger problem than over-paying for Internet access.