Comcast Takes Heat For Misleading ’10G’ Cable Broadband Branding
from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept
Back in 2019 the cable industry, envious of all the attention 5G wireless was getting, pulled a new marketing term completely out of its ass. It simply started calling ordinary cable broadband upgrades 10G, based on absolutely no real-world standards or definitions. It was a hollow attempt to capitalize on wireless 5G hype because these companies hope to someday offer 10 Gbps cable broadband.
Fast forward to 2023, and Comcast has gotten an adorable little wrist slap for its abuse of the marketing term.
The National Advertising Division (NAD) is part of the advertising industry’s self-regulatory system run by BBB National Programs. It’s basically an attempt for industry to claim that you don’t need government regulators with any backbone policing misleading ads, because industry will regulate itself.
It’s all a bit performative; “punishments” occur long after the ads have run. There’s no serious penalty for telling the organization to piss off (outside of an empty threat to forward concerns to actual regulators, who also may or may not actually give a damn). Still, the organization last week urged that Comcast stop abusing the “10G term,” or at the very least make it clear the term is “aspirational”:
“Discontinue its “10G” claims or qualify them to (a) make clear that Comcast is implementing improvements that will enable it to achieve “10G” and that 10G is aspirational, or (b) use “10G” in a manner that is not false or misleading.”
If you actually want 10 gigabit per second broadband, you’ll have to subscribe to fiber, not cable, especially when it comes to upstream speeds. And even then, symmetrical 10 Gbps tiers are pretty hard to find. One of the very few ISPs offering this kind of speed is Chattanooga’s city owned utility provider, EPB, a project companies like AT&T and Comcast have long tried to sue and harass out of existence.
So this stuff does matter. But it’s extremely unlikely NAD’s gentle prodding actually results in any meaningful change at Comcast. And it’s equally unlikely that over-extended U.S. regulators at the FCC or FTC much care that everybody’s least-favorite cable giant misleads and confuses consumers in this way.
Filed Under: 10g, 5g, advertising, broadband, cable, chattanooga, epb, fiber, high speed internet, nad, telecom
Companies: comcast
Comments on “Comcast Takes Heat For Misleading ’10G’ Cable Broadband Branding”
Lies?? Comcrap?!?!
Comcast would NEVER lie to us, they are honorable company with the best reputation!!!
/sarcasm
(just to be safe)
10G fraud
Not only is the network not 10G, but nearly nobody would benefit from residential 10Gbit. “10G” won’t help you stream 4K video, as it only requires about 30 Mbit. “10G” won’t help with downloads, as the upstream servers won’t send 10Gbit data. This is just another money grab from another US broadband provider.
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I totally need it for my street cred
/sarc
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Yes, exactly this.
You could have a 100G or a 10G connection but it doesn’t matter if the server is only sending out data at 5G.
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That assume one user connecting to one server. A family may use half a dozen connections, and a single machine may be streaming video and downloading updates at the same time.
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12 x 4K streams @ 25 Mbps = 300 Mbps. Still far from 10Gbit.
Save your money, don’t give it to Comcast.
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The bigger problem with American providers is that they’d freak out if you actually found a way to use it. Like if you said “hey, I’ve got 10 Gbps, so maybe I’ll use 20% of that to seed the latest Debian torrent”; that’d be like 5 million gigabytes of traffic, and Comcast for example charges overages in 50-gigabytes chunks ($10 each, but luckily capped at $100/month).
If only they would take the money they put into saying how great they are into actually make them meet their own hype, imagine where we would be now.
Reminds me of the old MadTV commercial about disposable razors. Of course, at the time we only had razors with three blades at the most on them.
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The Onion also predicted the five blade razor.
https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036
“Cable Broadband Branding”
Say that five times fast! (Which is about as serious as I can get regarding Comcast’s marketing strategies.)
Excuse my ignorance, but doesn’t the “G” here (as in “4G” or “5G”) stand for “Generation”, not Gigabit?
Your point still stands, regardless.
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Yes. The company wishes to capitalize on that confusion as well as the fairy tale of either.
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Not just the fairy tale of either, but the fantasy of ether as well. “Your download will be wafted to you, supported by the ether!
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Do we have some basis for that claim? Like, has Comcast said it, or is there some reasonable way for them to claim “10th generation”? We had pre-DOCSIS with telephone uploads, then proto-DOCSIS, DOCSIS 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 4.0… that’s only 8 and I’m being pretty generous with the counting (including minor releases and stuff I’m not sure Comcast ever used).
The “G” might as well stand for “Gangster”. I suspect that, to Comcast, it’s just a thing that the marketers thought would sound good. (Although… why bother? How many people with a realistic choice end up on Comcast?)
I can’t wait until Verizon comes out with 100G next year!!
It’ll be so fast we’ll be able to talk to people in the future!
That’s nothing. AT&T is going to roll out 200G, which is so fast that you can go back in time to communicate with people in the past and alter history.
That may be true in the USA. Internationally, 10 Gbit/s is growing rapidly, especially in Asia, and (25 Gbit/s is now available in Switzerland—for the same price as 1 Gbit/s or 10 Gbit/s. Most “home routers” struggle to do even 1 Gbit/s, so this person built a PC to handle routing.
I read elsewhere that Swisscom, the incumbent “last kilometre” infrastructure owner, had been admonished by regulators for building a passive optical network, which left third-party providers unable to plug a fibre into their own equipment to provide faster speeds than Swisscom. It seems that regulation works, and they’re now being forced to run individual fibres to homes.
I live near the interstate freeway..
And considering there are 3 older fiber lines going past the town, and at least 1+ call towers that are connected to Fiber(why would they use anything else).
Its confusing How in Hell we dont have access to Better fiber.
Also, to those that dont get HOW we talk to the internet. There are about 4-6 things to consider for BETTER SPEED.
Just cause its 1-10g. its the lag in the middle of the protocols.
Most of it is HOW fast you need to give access to ALL your devices. 5k-1meg is great for 1 item and the internet even YT/movies. But having a GREAT router (and being able to BUY ONE) to connect 2-4 devices Constantly. Would be amazing. Most routers are based on 10+ year old tech.
And you wonder Why we want BEtter from other nations.
That’s false advertising, we all know that Comcast Xfinity is an 0G.
10G would rarely be considered gigabit. More likely to be misidentified as a cellular service.
Comcast Internet on the higher offerings is more than 2x as fast as 5G cellular service.
I rarely have the need for the speeds we pay for, but average 700Mb on our 1.3 service. Around 300Mb up.
If the goal was to say you’re twice as fast as home 5G, they aren’t wrong.
Confusing? Yes
terms should be banned? Probably
But they didn’t exactly lie, either.