Mildly Infuriating

Imagine not calling your 10 Gig network Mr Gigs.

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.

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.

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.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/comcast-to-stop-calling-entire-network-10g-as-name-is-ruled-misleading/

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.

In Canada we have (had?) a telecom company come up with Fibe Internet, to mimic Fibre Internet.

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.

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.