NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] One more from George Ou: "The need for a broadband transparency standard"
One more from George Ou: "The need for a broadband transparency standard" http://bit.ly/2mbkyk (Digital Society) - - - Comments from Lauren: The key line in George's piece for me is: "The problem for the broadband industry is that no one wants to unilaterally advertise their network's actual limitations because that would be handing a free marketing advantage to their competitor." And therein lies the rub. But it's actually worse than that. The major ISPs explicitly use all manner of confusion and obfuscation in their marketing. Does AT&T admit the significant limitations of U-verse Internet service? Sure, if you dig down far enough in the promotional very fine print, and understand what it's saying. When Time Warner Cable (TWC) promotes their top speeds, is it ever made clear how much their "Speed Boost" (which increases speeds for a limited amount of data in a download -- however that's defined) skews the promoted numbers? Essentially no. For that matter, it seems ludicrous how AT&T and TWC promote their services in glorious terms of "fiber optic" performance, even though their actual connections to subscribers are usually by copper and coax respectively -- with serious performance limitations especially imposed by the former. Do they admit this? Yeah, deep in those fine print footnotes, where they note that fiber optics need only apply to "any portion" of the circuit. By that definition, virtually everybody with an ordinary landline POTS phone has "digital phone service," since fiber optics will probably be involved somewhere in most calls. So the question really becomes, what incentive would there be for these ISPs to "come clean" on all this, short of a regulatory requirement? --Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator