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 want anyway.
The actual technology has used more pragmatic (if less marketing friendly) terminology.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Ars reported on this at the end of January.
Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading “10G Network” claims. Comcast said it will drop “Xfinity 10G Network” brand name after losing appeal.
They say that but are running the ads this very night during college basketball games…
Yeah, it’s still confusing. It could be that since the ruling was made less than a month ago, there are active ad campaigns that they’re just going to let run their course, rather than cancel them.
But also, note the following from the source article:
Comcast said it may still use 10G in ways that are less likely to confuse consumers. “Consistent with the panel’s recommendation… Comcast reserves the right to use the term ‘10G’ or ‘Xfinity 10G’ in a manner that does not misleadingly describe the Xfinity network itself,” the company said.
When contacted by Ars, a Comcast spokesperson said, “We disagree with the decision but are pleased that we have confirmed our continued use of 10G in advertising.”
So maybe Ars overstepped in their headline?
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.
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
United States of Advertising
What is the average person going to use 10 gig internet for at home anyways? I’m sure comcast will just try to trick people into paying a lot of extra money for something that they won’t ever make use of.
The next one can be called “Series X…G”
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.
Imagine not calling your 10 Gig network Mr Gigs.
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.
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.
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.
Xfinity is Comcast. It’s incredible they were able to rebrand themselves.
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.
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.
