How Come No One Sues WiFi Equipment Makes For False Advertising?

Wireless

from the not-true-at-all dept

It’s widely known in the wireless industry that the “speeds” listed with WiFi equipment are greatly exaggerated. However, no one seems willing to list more realistic speeds, because that would make them look slower than the competition. Of course, this isn’t anything new for the wireless industry as a whole — who has always used the sneaky “up to” before describing the maximum possible speed (as in, “speeds up to 1 gazillion gigabytes per microsecond” thereby making anything well below that fair game). This maximum possible speed is usually under absolutely perfect conditions in a vacuum if you were somehow obscenely (we don’t want to know) close to the antenna/tower in question and no other living being was within 300 miles. Reality has a way of making those speeds much lower — often by more than 50% of the claimed speeds. With companies like Gillette getting slammed for false advertising concerning its razors that don’t actually lift hair away from your skin, why is it that no WiFi equipment vendors get sued for false advertising? The best guess reason is because everyone does it. Posting the theoretical maximum speed is just “how it’s done,” so no one within the industry expects any different. Meanwhile, customers never really notice because their 802.11g routers that are supposed to give them 54 megabits per second are usually used to connect to the internet over a pokey DSL or cable connection that don’t reach anywhere near the speeds of the local network.