Their marketing is pretty deceptive.
I get advertising flyers from the two high-speed ISPs in this area: Comcast and Verizon. Comcast advertises that their service has "a maximum speed of 6Mbps". Verizon, which is still only offering DSL in these parts, advertises 1Mbps.
This is what is deceptive: Nobody gives a shit about bits per second. File sizes are not measured in bits, but bytes. There are eight bits in a byte. So if you want to download a large file on Verizon, you might as well go get yourself a cup of coffee, as that 10MB video is really 80Mb and, since the maximum speed is rarely ever achieved, it'll take awhile.
And if you have dial-up at 56Kbps, which is usually more like 48Kbps, you can go cook a meal and do a load of laundry.
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Friday, March 26, 2010
7 comments:
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Eh, I wouldn't get too outraged. That's just how we've always measured network transmission speeds. We've been using that terminology long before Comcast and Verizon got into the ISP business.
ReplyDeleteBits/Sec is the correct way to look at it from the engineering perspective, but what can be misleading is the bps also counts all the overhead, so if there is an 8-megabit file (one megabyte), it will take a good bit more than that many bits to shepherd the file across the network.
ReplyDeleteDave
Comcast gives me 20 Mbps in the Denver area.
ReplyDeleteDeadstick, not around here.
ReplyDeleteNot that Comcast ever "gives" anything away....
But, but...ComBastards just changed their name to Xfinity! Didn't that make it al better?
ReplyDeleteGotta agree, this one isn't Comcast's fault. We've been talking about bits per second since 1200 bits per second was high speed.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with all ISPs is that, at least on occasion, you won't get the effective bps you're supposed to, because something upstream from your connection is jugged up. What sets ISPs apart in this regard is the amount of time that they spend at lower than maximum speed. Internet cable is notorious for this problem, often deservedly so. It's not unusual to have an 8Mbps link look slower than DSL.
This has nothing to do with megabits vs. megabytes, nor with network protocol overhead. It has to do with upstream capacity.
It makes me feel better in the same way that it did when Blackwater "Massacres R Us" Worldwide changed their name to Xe Teddy Bear Security Services.
ReplyDelete