Watchdog Clueless Broadband Segment

It's this the part where you expect me to quote the nonsense from 'webopedia' that says speed in it?

Those definitions are no more correct than if you said a flow rate was the speed of water in a pipe or current was the speed of electricity in a cable.
 
We're getting picky with terms here now, for the masses speed is fine, all they think of speed is the more you have the faster facebook loads.

In technical parlance it is most definately not speed, its a rate, which is the number of things you want to measure happening in a given time, the confusion lies in that the descriptions are the same (ie fast and slow)

For example "the exchange rate of usd fell fast this morning" would sound weird if you said "the exchange speed of usd fell fast this morning"
 
Ste59w said:
There's no need to be picky, mbps is a measurement of speed full stop.
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No.

For gaming, I'd take a 1Mbps service with a ping of 40-45 over a 35Mbps Satellite service with a ping of 100+.

'Speed' doesn't have a place here, it's bandwidth and latency.


If anything latency/ping is the speed.
 
Working for an ISP they actually did a decent job, although for me they didn't place enough emphasis on the line length. It was good to see some basic wireless in there too as that's by far the most common call type. My iPhone with a two inch long wifi antenna inside, in my bedroom on the other side of the house only gets 2meg download speed, I'm paying for 40, this is wrong and you're throttling my connection!

If ISP's start charging for speed faster connections will go up in price but slower ones will stay the same. The exchange equipment is all the same price!
 
Watchdog's irresponsible presentation of insufficiently geeked-up information and instruction is clearly leading to forum disagreements that could flood the internet and crash the servers... which is a
Potential Deathtrap!!!
 
Sasahara said:
But the main feature is people not getting the top speed.
Do these dim wit experts still not understand basic ADSL tech, so the "up to speed" is perfectly valid? :/
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They did explain this right at the start and during it :confused:
They went on to see how you can get more speed by doing basic things.
At no time did they do a "You are conning the British public please explain yourselves" type speech.
 
Average level 5 internet user

Internet Speed Stats

internet base speed = 20MB

-20% Celeron Of slowness
-30% Adware
-25% Mcaffee internet security of slowness
-21% Tool bars of pretend helpfulness
-15% 10 year old router
-20% Phone line of 10 extensions
-5% aged phone socket
-23% 4Gb PC using 6Gb ram
-5% Engine of searches ASK
-10% 17" 1080p monitor of letterbox goodness
-5% Mouse of not working very well

+10% slowness bonus for PC taking > 10mins to start
+5% slowness bonus for not knowing any passwords for anything despite having personally set them and +2% for loosing the paper they were written on
+50% slowness bonus for using AOL email, provider and desktop app

Perceived internet speed = 0.5mb
 
Totally picky, but these are correct:
Kenai said:
If you want to be picky, one is speed, one is a data rate more akin to flow volumes than speed or velocity.

Generally speed would be defined as time related to distance, megabits aren't units of distance, so can't really constitute a speed.
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adolf hamster said:
In technical parlance it is most definately not speed, its a rate, which is the number of things you want to measure happening in a given time, the confusion lies in that the descriptions are the same (ie fast and slow)
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Speed has units L/T. It's the magnitude of velocity. speed = mod(v) = mod(dx/dt)

Net connection 'speeds' are a rate of data transfer, i.e. bit/time.

Put it this way, you wouldn't say a pump moves water with a speed of 5 litres per minute would you? That's it's flow rate.
 
Speed is just a better marketing term than calling it data rate or throughput. Everyone and their Granny knows what speed means but not the latter. Doesn't really matter that technically it could be considered incorrect. In the end it's a consumer level service that you have to package it in a way that most inept person will understand it.
 
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