T’was 10G That Was Most Offensive At CES 2020, Not 5G As Expected
Can’t Provide 10Gbps? Why Not Just Call It 10G?
Cable providers who failed miserably at branding their internet services as 10G at last year’s CES found strength in AT&T’s questionable 5Ge branding as well as T-Mobile’s flat out misleading 5G icon this year and are back at it again. The Register describes how this farce came to be, with lobbyists deciding that DOCSIS 3.1’s theoretically maximum is 10Gbps and that it is, if you stretch the truth almost to the point of breaking, 10 times faster than 5G. Seeing as how marketers love repetition, they jumped on this idea and ran with it for the upcoming release of DOCSIS 4.0 network appliances.
The problem is that “10G Ready”, “10G Certified” with or without “CableLabs” slapped in front of that branding is still incredibly misleading for consumers and how frustrating it will be for the technically inclined to explain to them. 10G is not 10GE, nor is it every going to actually be able to deliver 10Gbps so it is about as meaningful as the descriptions on this page and every bit as good a value.
Look forward to spending time trying to explain to friends, family and customers why 10G is not 10GB/s, nor 10 Gpbs nor 10GE nor anything to do with reality at all.
As far as we can tell, “10G” already means two different things – both the DOCSIS 3.1 and DOCSIS 4.0 standards: much in the same way that AT&T ended calling 4G LTE by the moniker “5Ge”, and was attacked by its own industry.
Not quite sure what you mean about TMObiles misleading 5G icon, they haven’t done that. It was all ATT, TMobile has launched what is 5G, it’s just not mm wave 5G which is totally fine. It still has all the added benefits, more throughput, and mostly higher density since we are getting more and more devices connected.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/12/t-mobile-touts-nationwide-5g-that-fails-to-cover-130-million-americans/
Their launch was rather misleading and still is.
That article has a follup from T-Mobile where they clarify how the article was wrong. The authors didn’t rebut what was said leaving them proven wrong. Puff piece got deflated.
So, T-Mobile’s 5G icon only comes on when it’s actually 5G unlike AT&T which lights up a “5Ge” icon when it’s only on LTE.
I have to agree with kartspeedster@gmail.com on this one, yell at AT&T, but back off T-Mobile.
On a more focused note, what the hell is the 10G thing anyway? I know what 10GigE is, but what the heck is the rest? The last I heard, DOCSIS could push out maybe 1.5Gb/s over a massively bonded downlink. A downlink which is shared why everyone on that node which is often a few hundred subscribers and can be as high as a thousand.
Wireless, of course, is no different as each sector of each cell is a shared resource as well, so you don’t get all that bandwidth to yourself, either. Worse yet, I have heard that a number of providers are finding out that their 5G rollout is being held up by backhaul issies–they have more bandwidth between the cell tower and the subscribers than they do back to the internet. Oops.
All that makes me glad I went to fiber a year ago. My bandwidth is mine and the latency is amazing. Went from 30 some ms to 2. And there’s no variance, it’s *2* all the darn time.
Oh yeah for sure, totally agree with you here. I also find this hilarious since they are calling it 10G or whatever and just skipping the next 5 “generations” of setups lol. Makes no sense if you ask me.
I’m also really sad about carrier backhaul issues, it’s a potential big issue we face in the coming future with more and more connected devices.
Wish I had good fiber offerings in my area though, nothing here is very good. I’m working with Comcast to see if they can possibly bring their consumer 2 gigabit fiber out to my place, but it’s pretty spendy to get them to set it up and the monthly cost is high, would still be awesome to have 2 gigabit up and down though.