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.
Wireless “G” labeling has always mostly been marketing wank anyway.
The actual technology has used more pragmatic (if less marketing friendly) terminology.
It’s all about the benjamins. Ain’t nothing but a G thing.
Absolutely. 3G, 4G, 5G - they’re all a mess. Each G is a wild mix of specs with wildly varying speeds. And many parts of a next generation network are a glorified version of the previous generation network with no large generational speed bumps.
Government organizations like the FCC should force telecoms to advertise speeds as bits per second.
It’s tricky though, do they advertise their maximum speed in all areas? Or the minimum speed? Or the average speed?
If you have 50 megabit service in New York City with multiple millions of people can you then offer 3G speeds to the rest of the state and still advertise it is 5G?
I get 45 in town, is it a birthday party the other day and I could barely get 1.
The same problem exist today with access to 4G, LTE, 5G or 5G mm wave coverage in an area. Service is going to change based upon your exact location.
Regulators should just tell telecoms do to exactly what they do today - provide customers a coverage heat map. But base it average bandwidth at the network node, not what technology their marketing department has decided to call the node’s hardware.
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.
This smells a bit like the old Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades.
Pretty funny the blades on disposables actually did top out at 5. The Onion wins the prediction game again.
(I know there’s a 6 blade brand out there but I think it’s the only one, whereas all the big companies make 5. So glad I got out of the disposables and traded them for safety razors anyway-- dunno why it took me so long)
Probably fear of cutting yourself with that single blade.
That’s what took me so long.
BTW, anyone here who face shaves regularly, switch to a safety razor. This is a threat.
Yeah gotta admit I was pretty nervous the first couple times, kinda assuming I’d be just shaving and all of a sudden see a long trail of blood appear. After I got used to it though it’s just as fast as using a disposable, and I haven’t cut myself yet
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…
In Canada we have (had?) a telecom company come up with Fibe Internet, to mimic Fibre Internet.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
United States of Advertising
Because of all the bullshit with subsidies etc. intended for improving broadband infrastructure being abused, my dream is:
- All the poles & lines (and access rights to them) are nationalized and then opened up for individual ISPs to service. Current ISP exclusivity contracts/agreements should be dissolved. Let them actually compete for customers with price, features and customer service.
- The government should also offer tax-funded baseline connectivity to everyone since it’s effectively impossible to live in modern society without internet access. The provided speeds must be sufficient for a typical bloated framework-script-heavy site, all (meta)data/packets should be considered constitutionally protected private info not able to be monitored/scraped/sold.
- Use building out and supporting the above as a useful jobs program instead of more military adjacent stuff.
In my city there is so much completion in the internet space that the prices have dropped significantly. It is also in very high demand as my city is growing extremely fast.
I’m not sure if it will last but the demand made it cost effective for the internet companies to install fiber everywhere. They literally have trucks and people deploying new fiber lines 5 days a week.
You have my vote if you run for office.
I’ve heard in other countries they have a CHOICE of electricity providers. Boggles my mind. CHOOSE who you buy electricity from? Like more than 1?
This is the case in the UK. Rare example of where privatisation of a utility went well. Don’t ask about the water
Pennsylvania has choice of electricity provider. You pay a line maintenance fee to the line owner of a few cents per kWh, then you have a choice of dozens of providers for the electricity itself.
In Atlanta I had a choice of natural gas companies, even though it would have been cheaper if there were simply one single regulated monopoly.
Competing utilities are just a way to give out cash to rent-seeking middlemen.
Imagine not calling your 10 Gig network Mr Gigs.
That name again is Mr. Gigs
Are you from the Onion?
I’m sorry sir, I only possess moderately passable IT skills.
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.
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.
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.
Xfinity is Comcast. It’s incredible they were able to rebrand themselves.
Fuck Comcast. Even when it was clear what they were referring to, they made it seem like they were offering 10gigabit fiber service. Nope, same old service offerings. There’s some plausibility: some of us have had gigabit fiber for years and if ComCast wants to reset its reputation. One way is to jump ahead rolling out the next generation of technology. Nope. @Next generation of technology” is apparently upgrading their infrastructure to be able to achieve what they’ve sold for years
Is 200/20M asymmetric, over provisioned up the wazoo, shared across the neighborhood m, high latency, any better now that it’s relabeled?
I’ve personally had ok experiences with them. There service is fast and well priced. There support can be a little annoying at times but they get the job done for the most part.
Compare that to AT&T which is expensive and awful to deal with. There support is the worst support I’ve ever talked to. I had to deal with them for work and they kept transferring me repeatedly and I even managed to get on the line with a computer trying to sell me an alert button in case I fell.
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