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.
Screen manufacturers just did a similar thing with the jump from 1080p to 4k
The 1080 part of the original number referred to the number of pixels from top to bottom, 4k refers to left to right. 4k is actually only 2160 from top to bottom though (at the same aspect ratio).
So they quadrupled the number when it should have only doubled, and it was entirely a marketing thing.
Don’t even get me started on the bullshit that is calling 1440p 2k
1440p can be seen as 720p * 2.
There are 4x the pixels so…
I don’t disagree with the change either. Having a large number makes it more difficult to compare. After 2160 it’s 4320. 2k, 4k, and 8k are far easier to remember and figure out the differences.
In my past life I was a video editor while 4k was still at its infancy, and my coworker was furious saying that reporters were idiots for saying that 4K was 4 times the size of HD, it was just the name. And I’m like, dude is actually 4 times more and show him a picture of the size comparison of both and he was really ashamed, but I told him it was ok because I was also thinking the same until I read an article about it.
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Exactly. The up tick in resolution was slow, 360 to 480 to 720 to 1080. Relatively small improvements. Then we jump to 2160/4k and the resolution goes up by 400% from the previous 1080. 4k is 4x1080 screens put together.
1440 was a thing when 2160 released. 4k is a shit name because it infers you know what generation it’s 4 times the size of
4K doesn’t mean 4x the size. It means there’s (nearly) 4000 pixels from side to side.
There are 4x the pixels so…
Totally agree, but then
2k, 4k, and 8k
Is internally inconsistent!
If 4k is four times the pixel count of 1080, then 2k means 1440 (-ish, it should be 1530) - that’s fine. But then 8k must be 3050, but it is actually 4320!!!
So it can not refer to the number of pixels (quadratic scaling). On the other hand, if we assume linear scaling and 8k is 4320 and 4k is 2160, then 2k is 1080 - but 2k is never used in that context!
Edit: as you can see I’m very passionate about this XD
But at least 4k is indeed 4 times bigger than 1080p, at least in terms of pixels, so it’s not all bullshit in a way
I like to call 1440 “4k” as well because it’s 4 times bigger than 720. Stupid fucking naming system
4K refers to the horizontal resolution of the video, not how much larger than FullHD it is.
Also 1440p is sometimes called QHD (Quad HD) because it’s 4x 720p aka HD
The correct naming scheme btw, if you don’t subscribe to bad marketing:
640x480 = SD (NTSC)
768x576 = SD (PAL)
1280x720 = HD
1920x1080 = FullHD/FHD
2048x1080 = DCI 2K
2560x1440 = QuadHD/QHD
3840x2160 = UHD
4096x2160 = DCI 4K
7680x4320= UHD2
K means 1000 by convention though, and 1080 is the closest to 1000
The K refers to horizontal resolution though. The Resolution used for cinema are 2048x1080 aka DCI 4K and 4096x2160 aka DCI 4K. TV manufacturers thought it would be fun to market UHD aka 3840x2160 as 4K, which it isn’t. It‘d be 3.8K if you’d have to label it like that.
It’s not though
I agree the naming system is dumb, but it’s dumb because 2k is 2x 720p and 4k is 4x 1080p
1440p in a 16:9 aspect ratio has a resolution of 2560x1440 though, not 2160x1440
Type the right numbers in. It’s 4x
Why marketers are allowed to label the speed of a network is just beyond me as an engineer. Call it whatever you want. “Our Purple speed”. Don’t care. But underthat it should be labeled with a standard 1gbps/1gbps.
That would shut up xfinity’s bullshit claims pretty quick. “Our new Plaid speed fiber” 200mbps/4mbps
Seriously I called them years ago asking about fiber, they were real hyped, they bragged they could give me 800! 800 what I asked. Megabytes! Megabytes or Megabits? 800 Megabits, okay fine, symmetric right? Well, no one uses upload anyway. That was their literal response.
Download-only internet.
Your water line is now connected! There is no way to turn on the taps in the house.
symmetric right?
I talked about this in another thread recently, but my favorites are the ones that are so lopsided that you literally can’t send back ACKs fast enough to keep up with your own download speeds when using TCP.
I’ve had that! Upload so bad that I couldn’t even send out a request! Even the DNS requests failed. “But you have download available”. Yes, mr customer service, but how does it know what to download?
The worst part is that it’s actually less than 4k pixels on the top.
And 4K isn‘t even correct in the horizontal direction. “4K” TVs have a horizontal resolution of 3840 pixels. That’s 3.8K. True 4K, as used in movie production (aka DCI 4K) is 4096x2160
Technically should be called 4.096K I suppose
2160p is not that uncommon though. Saying 4K is just an abbreviation and it’s easier to say while still letting everyone know what you’re talking about. I don’t actually like the term 4K though because it’s a bit ambiguous because of how many different flavors of 4K there are.
It’s actually even worse. They tried to pass off 2048x1080 as a big upgrade over 1920x1080 by marketing it as “2K”. It didn’t work, but locked marketing into using the horizontal resolution.
That’s actually being used in the context of movie production. It’s called DCI 2K. Same with DCI 4K, which is 4096x2160 and thus actual 4K
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?
Ad buys for TV are generally scheduled ahead of time as part of a campaign.
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.
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.
10GB or GiB?
Doesn’t really matter for the point they’re making, does it?
I mean it is similar confusing
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Canada we have (had?) a telecom company come up with Fibe Internet, to mimic Fibre Internet.
Imagine not calling your 10 Gig network Mr Gigs.
That name again is Mr. Gigs
United States of Advertising
Fraud is legal if you’re doing it to consumers
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.
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