Comcast says it represents a 10 Gigabit cable internet network they are building (it doesn’t exist) so they are basically changing the meaning of the g from generation to gig to act like 10g is 5 generations better (or twice as fast)…or that they have a 10 gigabit network. Neither is accurate. It’s still just cable internet that people have to use because they have no other option.
Fuck Comcast.
I read online they are abandoning the “confusing” 10g branding but I just saw a commercial for it. They think all of their customers are morons and count on folks having no other choices in a lot of cases.
Apologies to anyone outside the United States, this is just complaining about our poor internet options and deceptive advertising by greedy corporations.
ITU defined 4G in 2008 as wireless connectivity with speed of 100 megabits per second for mobile users and 1 gigabit per second for stationary users.
LTE never achieved such speeds. It did not stop mobile operators from calling their service 4G.
ITU since then revised their definition to lower the required network speed.
5G was supposed to have network speeds of 10 gigabits per second. ITU however wisened up and are just defining it as ‘fifth-generation wireless’, because the mobile operators will butcher the definition anyway.
LTE Long term evolution, I think 5g is still LTE. 5g builds on the tech of 4g.
Yup. 5G is LTE with more frequency bands.
Just slap one more antenna into your phone, that’s how we’re increasing network speed.
Interesting
Well there you have it. If ITU hasn’t defined 10G, then ISP’s can call it whatever they want. It’s not regulated.
Fraud is legal if you’re doing it to consumers
If you finance the campaigns of the folks who make the laws anything can be made legal
It was hilariously reading the presser on NBCComcrap talking about how 10G DOCSIS development is progressing and they could almost hit 10Gbps in labs on the downlink but uplink would only be a few hundred megabits tops. Like, none of those numbers are worth selling a marketing brand of “10G”. Real fiber Internet can hit it, my provider offers 10Gbps/10Gbps. That could be called “10G” - if we continued to conflate speed with generations like Comcrap tried to do.
I really wish the FCC would step up and slap all these companies perpetuating these weird lie terms the last half a decade.
Haha yes it would be nice if the FCC wasn’t beholden to these companies based on their lobbyists flooding money into Washington…
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Honestly 200mb/s is fine for 1-2 people and gigibit if fine for a family with many devices.
I think the real bottle neck is the hardware. People have a poor understanding of how networking hardware works so to them its just a magical box that can do infinite speeds.
You are conflating Internet service speed and mobile generations. I work for an ISP. I hear this all the time. Especially since there’s also “5G WiFi” which is 5 GHz band. People confuse it all, and it’s understandable but still annoying.
My company offers 1 Gbps service. No one is getting confused by that yet, but our modems have 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports now, and I had a customer that was outraged the other day because “Your modem is only 2.5 G and all my devices use 5G! You need to send me a 5G modem!!” FFS
Sure, but they really should be describing it as 10Gb (gigabit). Even that could easily get confused with 10GB (gigabyte), which would be used for a file size.
10GB or GiB?
Doesn’t really matter for the point they’re making, does it?
I mean it is similar confusing
I don’t think the average person even knows GiB exists, since Windows and all the random flash drive manufacturers have mislabeled and confused the two for ages now.
I think you’ll find, if your look deep, that the average customer IS DUMB AS FUCKING BRICKS AND DOESN’T KNOW WHAT FROM WHAT, BIG NUMBER GOOD
Internet providers have always done this. Its not a new thing.
Not just internet providers. Data communication speeds have always been in bits per second. Historically it makes perfect sense.
Specifying speed in bytes per second would be inconvenient because while we settled on 8 bits per byte in the early days of computing this was not the case. 6-bit bytes were common, but other sizes were used too, 7,8, 9, 10 and sometimes even larger.
So when you’re talking about communication between different types of computers with different size bytes, it would be confusing to use bytes/second as a unit.
Even now that we’ve by and large settled on 8 bits per byte it’s still useful to call out the communication rate as distinct from the actual payload data transfer rate, as there are other sources of overhead.
You’ll never actually see a 1MB/s transfer over an 8Mbps connection because some of those bits are going to be used for things like packet headers, keep alive messages, etc.
Honestly, this is the same shit the telcoms have been doing for decades. They also did it with the previous generations.
When telcoms started promoting “3G” it was a mix between networks with proper broadband speeds, and edge networks that were more like 2.5G. 4G was an even bigger dumpster fire with a very wide array of “fourth generation” specs that ranged from glorified 3G to actual next generation speeds. And 5G is a repeat of this marketing bullshit trend.
You can really see the effects of this if you get to rural coverage areas. Your phone might say it’s on 5G or 4G, and you might be experiencing shit speeds even if you have decent reception. You might be on a part of the network that the marketing department considers 4 or 5G, but doesn’t mean it’s actually fast.
IMHO, we need consumer protection laws that prevent companies from using brand names or generational buzz words to trick customers. Network speeds should be advertised in bits per second, or standardized BPS chunks.
Cell carriers in the US releasing 3G+ technologies branded as 4Gs should have gotten the FTC on a crackdown, but regulatory capture and it is all just marketing fluff. The sales flacks selling it can’t even answer questions like “what kinds of bandwidth can I expect to see? Do I get a minimum QoS?”
“You’re minimum speed in your area is 5G with Unlimited Stream Blast+”
Up to a trillion gigabits per second, or less, guaranteed. Some restrictions apply. See store for details. Offer may not be redeemed on days ending in Y. Offer does not exist. Void where prohibited.
Also, why was 4G called LTE but not 3G or 5G?
It’s all mostly a marketing speak.
LTE is a proper name for the latest flavour of a wireless connectivity steandard. It simply means ‘long-term evolution’, because naming it after the actual underlying algorithms would be ‘orthogonal frequency-division with multiple access’ was too long even for nerds who created that standard, and also it uses simpler frequency-division with multiple access for transmitting data from your phone to the cell tower, so the actual proper name would be ‘OFDMA uplink FDMA downlink’.
And 5G is still mostly LTE, just with extra radio channels and an optional millimeter frequency support.
There were similarly several 3G technologies - HSDPA, HSPA+, DC-HSDPA, DC-HSDPA w/MIMO, each offering a better speed, but that would be confusing, so the operators just named everything as 3G.
So it’s like saying 802.11 instead of Wifi?
Kind of, yeah.
There are WiFi setups that can cover as far as 10 km range, which is firmly inside 4G territory, with a speed to match.
It depends on the carrier. I’m on AT&T’s network, and they have parts of the network that they labeled “4G” and parts that they labeled “LTE.”
The simplest answer is to Google what your carrier considers LTE, 3G, and 4G speeds. Some carriers consider LTE to be their “4G,” some carriers have networks labeled 4G and LTE, some carriers consider LTE to be 3G+, some consider 4G to be 3G+ … it’s all a big mess, it depends on what the marketing team decided to label the network hardware, and every carrier has different definitions for the same terms.
Meanwhile my fiber provider actually offers 5 gig symmetrical for $150 a month. I don’t have the network gear to do over a gig, but they offer it and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and better than Comcast.
I was genuinely convinced they offered 10gig service in some markets. Doesn’t surprise me that its all marketing nonsense.
Just a tip for anyone who wants to know, if you have Comcast business internet they’ll tell you you have to use their modem but, you can swap it out with a 3rd patty modem and use the live chat service to get it activated. Then you can send back their modem for free at a ups store. Every salesperson will tell you its not possible but it absolutely is.
If the end user was getting 10 gig I wouldn’t even be all that mad about it.
Xfinity is Comcast. It’s incredible they were able to rebrand themselves.
They should be forced to have a standard like a food label. Should show average speed and uptime for past 12 months
Crazy idea…
Phone OS developers often fight with carriers about the network labels that get displayed on a phone’s status bar. Carriers often demand a certain name and label to be shown.
Apple does some shitty stuff, but they have often been able to strong-arm carriers into industry-wide customer experience improvements, because they have a monopoly on iOS and have fast OS update adoption. Apple should just push a software update that always shows bandwidth instead of “4G,” “LTE,” “5G.” Then they should update their maps app to show crowd sourced bandwidth speeds across a carriers’s network.
Air their dirty laundry and watch them squirm.
Good idea on theory but it would have to constantly be doing speed tests in the background and those eat up a ton of bandwidth. All the phone knows is what kind of network it’s connected to and what kind of signal strength it has
Cellular networks a can already monitor bandwidth, signal strength, packet loss, etc. They just need to expose that data to the public. There is no need for extra “speed tests.” The network’s speed can be measured during an upload / download to a phone.
That’s not an effective metric because you don’t know the network speed of the host that the user was downloading from. It’s impossible to tell if the network is slow, or the site they visited was throttled to .5mb. speed tests work because the server you’re downloading from is a known entity
Pretty sure they’re getting sued on 10g.
But 5g is bullshit too.
The telecoms agreed what threshold of improvement warranted a “new g” but they sell more funa when the number goes up.
So they started making up sub versions of 4g and then all agreed to have 5g before meeting the threshold for it.
Yep, this is exactly it. When 3g was going away and 4g was starting up, T-Mobile pulled the same thing trying to brand their UMTS stuff as 4g when it’s clearly a 3g protocol. You can always rely on the marketers to lie until the end of time.
The next one can be called “Series X…G”
This is confusing, but the mobile gens are for cell data.
Wifi has 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands.
Internet service can be offered with Gbps speeds. 10Gbps can be called 10gig or 10g. That’s also crazy fast for what’s standard right now.
Verizon and TMobile have been advertising 5g home internet with a discount to their mobile customers, I think that is where Comcast is aiming these ads. To get people to conflate it. Most folks watching these ads don’t know what a gigabit is they are just thinking oh wow maybe Comcast is better.
For the people who do know what a gigabit is, Comcast is saying they are “building a 10 gig network” which means fucking nothing. I’m building a 1,000 story house. There are going to be 998 new stories on my house soon, you see! You’ll see.
Comcast can’t even do symmetric speeds. I’m not sure what locations have thier best speeds but in my area, where they compete with the much more affordable but not as large coverage area offerings of fiber. The idea that they could offer even a signle gigabit level service to the majority of their customers is laughable.
I bet it did lead to a lot of confusion especially when you called up for 10GIGABITS and got offered plans in the Megabits with usage limits and overage fees and all kinds of complicated shit. I called in to cancel my service a few months back when i moved to an area with fiber again, they said “we offer gigabit too you know” and i was like , nah you kinda don’t actually, but even if you did its like 3 times as expensive for just the download speeds.
Comcast offers 2gigabit in the town I work in. So yea, they kinda do offer it in certain areas. You are correct though, very limited upload speeds.
I am so, so, SO glad I’m now in a home with access to fiber Internet. Real, 2 gigabit symmetric fiber.
The cable company keeps sending me glossy ads in the mail - several per week - trying to get me to go back to 1/4 the bandwidth at the same price. Uhhhh… no.
Same here. Before fiber came to my suburb I could only choose AT&T or Comcast. AT&T’s fastest plan was 50mbps and never pulled more than 30. They’ve had permits here to put up Verizon 5G towers for 5 years but haven’t built a single one because of the tin foil hat brigade. I would love to switch to Verizon because I’d save a shitload on bundling it with my cell phones. Verizon has LTE but that would be like going back to the DSL.
What you need is to get your neighborhood on board. If you can generate interest they it suddenly becomes more cost effective for a company to install fiber.
Spectrum’s “deal” for my location was 500/10 mbps for $90/month “introductory price”. I asked what the price would be at the end of the introductory period, and they refused to tell me.
Meanwhile, Frontier gives me 2/2 gbps for $100/month, no price changes.
I have no interest in TV, I don’t even pay for streaming, so at the end of the day Internet performance is all I care about.
Our subdivision was built in about 2004. They didn’t put dark fiber in the ground, for some reason. It took about fifteen years for a private company to come in and lay fiber. I had Comcast/Xfinity at the time (I think it was 250Mb, and definitely asynchronous), who had already started sending out their promotions for gigabit internet service, so I called them up to see if I could get that. “That’s only available if you get internet and TV and phone.”
Oh, so you can give me just gigabit internet, but you won’t give me just gigabit internet.
It was another year before the fiber service was lit, I was the first person to get it in my neighborhood, and it is absolutely fantastic.