Tons of AT&T and Verizon customers may not have "broadband" on Thursday [telecom]

What an incredibly misleading headline. They'll have exactly the same service they have now, it just won't be *called* broadband by the FCC. The rest of us aren't bound by the FCC's terminology, which is mainly useful for them compiling statistics about the availability of different services.

I'm reminded of the old quote (supposedly from Abraham Lincoln):

Q: How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? A: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

And Pluto didn't change in any way when astronomers decided that it didn't fit the definition of "planet".

Finally, telecommunications engineers have had a completely different definition of "broadband" for many years. It's not related to any specific speed, just the ability to carry multiple signals:

We may not have 'broadband access", but we've got "High Speed Internet" -- or anyway, that's what at&t (and now Frontier) call their ADSL service, with its supersonic 768 Kbps (nominal) download speeds (and, I think, roughly 150 Kbps upload speeds). And we had that long before the new 25 Mbps minimum cut off our "broadband access". Doesn't that cheer you up?

Cheers, -- tlvp

On Wed, 28 Jan 2015 22:42:24 -0500, Barry Margolin wrote: ........

And when ADSL was first introduced it was actually "Broadband" because it had voice and data on the same physical carrier, the term was then hijacked by ignorant marketing droids to mean any sort of Internet connection with rates greater than dial-up modem connections and has basically been misused ever since.

I have a Naked DSL service that does not have a phone connection, it is NOT "Broadband" (if anything it is "Baseband"). If I got a phone service put back on it then it would actually be "Broadband" again.

I still consider it a mark of technical ignorance to see anyone use the term "Broadband" simply for high-speed Internet services.

In article you write:

A front page article in today's Financial Times points out that the new definition of broadband is bad news for the Comcast - Time-Warner merger. Now there are a whole lot fewer places where the cable companies have competition that qualifies as broadband, which means that the merger looks even more like consolidating a monopoly.

It's not clear whether that was the FCC's intention, but it's definitely their effect.

R's, John

Sorry: no matter how many sales 'droids intend "unlimited" to mean "throttled each month to 100 Kbps after the first 500 MB in traffic", that is not now, was never, and never will be, what "unlimited" means :-) .

Cheers, -- tlvp

Yes, but ...

... what, exactly, *does* "unlimited" mean?

This might seem like an obvious question. It's not.

Does "unlimited" mean "without limits"?

Obviously not: there are limits imposed by the technology which is currently deployed, by Claude Shannon, by government regulation, and by such mundane factors as battery capacity, transmitter power, and the human capacity to process and absorb information.

Does "unlimited" mean "all the bandwidth we have anytime you want it"?

Obviously not: some of the bandwitch has to be reserved for control signals, for voice calls, for E911 position reporting, and for other "unlimited" users whom are surfing the net at the same time.

Does "unlimited" mean "Not subject to rate caps"?

Obviously not: any shared-use system has to have rate caps. That's the only way to avoid bandwidth hogs and the Tragedy of the Commons.

There's no way around it: "unlimited" is "impossible".

Bill

Actually, no, that's not the case. Obvious counterexample: TCP, which has rate *control*, but no rate *cap*. In an uncongested channel, given time,[1] TCP will send at the maximum rate, and if sharing with other (correct) TCP implementations, it will automatically find the "fair share" transmission rate (which is the maximum rate that does not induce congestion).

This has actually been formalized: there's a class of rate-control algorithms known variously as "TCP friendly" or "TCP compatible" which have this convergence property provided that the vast majority (doesn't have to be all) of competing traffic employs a similar rate-control algorithm. It's entirely possible that there exist other classes of rate-control algorithms with the same property within-class but that don't play nice with TCP. (And by "TCP" here, we're specifically referring to the post-Van Jacobson TCP with congestion avoidance.)

-GAWollman

[1] Sometimes, it takes too much time, and a great deal of recent work on TCP has gone into finding the channel capacity faster and more accurately without losing the fairness property over congested links.

Yes. That may be an unrealistic promise, but the companies that offer it have promised it anyway.

And so we can assume that Real Soon Now, all those companies will withdraw their dishonest "unlimited" offers and start telling people, in their ads, exactly what the limit is and exactly what will happen (whether that is throttling, or extra charges, or both) to customers who go over that limit.

Then we'll finally have honest competition, and the bidding by high-use customers for the additional capacity they want can begin in earnest. (Perhaps resulting in the building of more capacity, if it will pay to build it.)

This is why the TracFone ruling is a major Good Thing for consumers.

And therefore advertising it is "false advertising".

Is there not a defense to the effect the impossibility of something is so obvious that claiming it was to be believed and relied upon is unsupportable?

How about an ad for a recently-popular class of life-style enhancing medications stating that taking it will "make the sun shine tomorrow"; it rains, I sue; how far would that get?

Not in our context of telephone service.

Based on the other offerings of telephone service, "unlimited" means just that--no limits or rate issues of any kind. The customer paid a flat rate and could use the srevice as much as he wanted.

For instance, some folks with residential unlimited phone service were heavy talkers and used the phone all day and evening. They could do so. (Admittedly, in the old days the phone company had only limited means to test individual lines for very heavy use.) But overall, when the phone company chose to offer the unlimited packages, they knew in advance from experience that some people would be heavy users and were prepared for it.

Today, the carriers know full well that some digital users will be heavy. If they expect that some heavy users will "break the bank" as it were in terms of capacity, than it is simply impractical to offer "unlimited" digital service. If they offer it but also have in place rate surcharges or digital limits, then they are indeed falsely advetising their service.

Some old voice carriers did not offer unlimited service, but rather a very high number of calls for a flat fee. For most users, this would be the same as unlimited, but some heavy users still had to be careful. There's no reason modern carriers couldn't do likewise--advertise different tiers of digital service, so that light, moderate, and heavy users can all pick the best plan for themselves.

While it's not fair to consumers to advertise a service as unlimited when it's not, it is also unfair for heavy users to "suck out" too much of the infrastructure when they should be really be using a thicker heavy-duty connection. An analogy: generally speaking, a business won't be allowed to route its big tractor trailers over small neighborhood streets, but will have to use arterial roads instead.

P.S. IMHO, it's dishonest for a company to claim "unlimited", stick an asterisk, and then say, in fine cryptic print, that there ARE limits to the service. But nowadays, every business does that. Doesn't make it right.