How Broad is Broadband? 441
Photon01 writes "The Register reports that UK ISP NTL have lost, in a ruling that their advertisement of their 128k broadband service as 'High Speed Broadband Internet' is misleading.
This is despite it clearly meeting the technical definitions of broadband internet.
Apparently 128k broadband is not broad enough." My first cable modem was only 256k. It wasn't blazingly fast but after being stuck on dialup it was heaven, and I imagine 128k wouldn't be so bad for a single household.
Perhaps a New System... (Score:5, Interesting)
In addition, there seems to be a growing trend of 'broadband' carriers who are slowly jacking down the bandwidth to each individual, either by packing in more consumers on a main line, or forcing the hardware to lower rates. In any case, more unsolicited disclosure would be welcomed.
Broadband misused (Score:1, Interesting)
Latiency (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think this is bad (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to call them on it, but the apartment won't take responsibility ("we're not the network guys, we just pay for it") and the actual ISP won't either ("we just provide what they pay us for"). It infuriates me because I think the ISP is trying to pull a fast one on the apartment complex and the complex just doesn't know any better. Even the head technician claims that 64k is two to three times faster than 56k cause it's full-duplex (doesn't help my download speed) and ethernet means reduced latency (still doesn't help my big downloads).
Someone get Cogentco [cogentco.com] to come to Utah. Now *that's* what I consider "ultra high-speed internet!"
Definition of broadband (Score:3, Interesting)
I couldn't find anything on their site which calims that their 128Kbps service is broadband. 10Mbps ethernet is not broadband. Neither is 100Mbps or 1Gbps ethernet. Somehow the market decided that the word "broadband" means "fast".
Broadband is not a measure of speed. It means you're transmitting data on several frequencies at once, to maximize the capacity of the physical medium. I sincerely doubt that anything running at 128kbps is using broadband modems. We have ISDN repeaters for that.
DSL (Score:5, Interesting)
I was stuck on iDSL on covad for 2 years till they fixed our phone lines.
Good points, faster than modem, almost 3x. And ping was great, 20ms to all hops in Seattle. (Low ping bastard for games)
So it was doable. And compared to ISDN which you had to bind the channels together, and dial out, was a snap, static IPs and never a disconnect.
Total cost, about 400 bux for a modem, 100 bux a month service.
Now YOU bitch about the price of high speed DSL.
streaming video standard (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:don't bitch (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, bps (bits per second) is extremely misleading too. Why not be honest and saying: "64K" bytes per second.
This is, 8bits/char plus the two extra bits due to parity and other information.
Don't make numbers go naked! Put units on them!
Side note: 2 bits == nibble
What a strange case (Score:3, Interesting)
But then found out that the lawyers were arguing it wasn't "broadband". ie, some stupid slime has stolen physicist's language, and is trying to force change in terminology through law. They didn't have a beef with the "high speed" part, instead they chose to pick on "broadband".
Re:The term is stupid, anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Where I am, the phone company used to advertise thier DSL in the vein of "No sharing access!!!", in reference to the fact that cable subscribers all use the same wire to get to the distribution point, which leads to slowdowns as more people are added. Every household, however, has it's own dedicated line to the CO - no sharing, so it's faster, right? All fine and good, yes? Not quite.
What they didn't tell you is that each of the COs were provisioned with but a single T1. So, you now have 40 or 50 people each screaming down thier own, dedicated 1Mb pipe to squeeze through a single T1 just a little farther down stream. Pot, Kettle, Black. To boot, the cable access goes up to 25Mb at the end of most streets. Guess which runs faster, all the time?
Unless you know something of how the technology actually works, marketers can easily prey on you. I've steered more than a few people away from the DSL service in protest of the above misleading advertising tactic, plus the fact that they either don't know what they're doing or are too cheap to provide at least an E10 to all of the COs. They're the phone company, fercryinoutloud - they must have better access than that around.
A lesson in making sure your "broadband" ISP knows how to build a proper high speed network from end to end.
Soko
Re:Not Broad Enough (Score:1, Interesting)
It took me about 2 months to build my tower working on it on the weekends. Plenty of howto stuff on the internet on it. The only tricky part was making myself a gin pole and figuring out how much quickcrete I needed for the base ( 32 bags, 3x3x4 hole ). You could probably do the concreting even cheaper then I did if your willing to mix morter, sand and gravel. I'm wasn't though for varoius reasons.
These are pretty cool:
http://www.locustworld.com/
You'll need some of these:
http://www.hyperlinktech.com/web/cable_ad
And one of these:
Prism 2.5 200mW - http://www.mt.lv/
Hook'em up point them at each other, bam, you have internet.
I had several people tell me that my ping would be high ( its not ), it would be slow ( its a heck of alot faster then 26.4 modem ), and it would be unstable. Well, its pretty stable, I wouldn't hook a heart monitor up to it though.
It's funny... (Score:5, Interesting)
My home ADSL is 1.5Mb.
Where I work (the R&D hub of the Air Force) has OC-12s and -48s and who knows what else, coming out of its ears.
But the link from inside to outside goes through so many filters and firewalls that reading email, loading a web page, or trying to download the latest security patch goes far far faster at home than at work.
(And it's not competing traffic from the rest of the base's inhabitants, either. Trying to pull stuff off the net in the middle of the night when nobody else is there isn't any faster. Grumble.)
Re:Perhaps a New System... (Score:4, Interesting)
I know it's stupid but we need to do what CD-ROM drive manufacturers have done and call it 4X or 8X and measure it against a base rate of, say 56kbps.
TV ads for BTOpenworld Broadband already say that their connection is up to 10X faster, so why not adopt that as our unit of measure.
Re:Perhaps a New System... (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, that guy was a sheister, and I no longer work there!
-Ben
Re:Marketting stealing technical definitions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Young whipper snappers (Score:1, Interesting)
after a couple months of telling them to walk away from pacbell, pacbell finally offered them a deal of 3K a month for a full T1. This is after me screaming at them they had 3 T1 lines for their voice. only after I pointed that out did pacbell admit T1 was ok for data.
What's the point of the story? Telco's are in the business to make money and the sales person may be getting a cut, so what you pay is totally relative to who you talk to, when you talk to them, what specials are available and how the ISP feels. One day broad band might mean 512 and another day it might be 128. Shopping around and being aware is the only way to make sure you get your dollars worth.
Re:relative (Score:2, Interesting)
(Luck that I was actually revising this last night, for my uni. exams).
Trian
EE Terms (Score:3, Interesting)
Contrasted with "baseband", which is the simple placement of an electrical signal on a wire.
Ethernet uses a baseband method of signaling. Hence the technical terminology "100 Base TX" 100 Megabit, baseband signaling. The TX, I forget what that represends.
Baseband signaling is trivial to interpret...an ethernet adapter only needs to be aware of three states on the wire...0, 1, and null. As opposed to broadband, where the adapter needs to be aware of the different signal levels and frequencies and pick the right channel from the wire to modulate/demodulate over.
How can a lawyer define a technical term? "Broadband" has been misused because DSL/Cable are implimentations of broadband, but broadband signaling is not implicitly faster (or slower) than baseband signaling. There is no debate over what "broadband" means, it is explicitly defined in the world of electrical engineering, and has been for many years.
WTF do the lawyers think they can get off doing?