2G, 3G, 4G, 5G mobile data made some sense as it represents generational leaps in the technology itself but then Xfinity wants to advertise "10g" internet...

mysoulishome@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 394 points –

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.

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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.

I think you'll find, if your look deep, that the average customer IS DUMB AS FUCKING BRICKS AND DOESN'T KNOW WHAT FROM WHAT, BIG NUMBER GOOD