In reply to a post by billford:

Mine (and tbb's) is sync'd to NPL. The UK time standard, part of the UTC world-wide time definition.

In reply to a post by tide:

That could all well have been made irrelevant if the motion to forward our clocks to central European time were to take effect,

So CET would make UTC irrelevant... Oh boy, oh boy...

Edited by billford (Sat 05-Mar-11 10:37:31)

In reply to a post by yarwell:

Also I am not sure what you mean by the advertisment been connection speed only

Look at the numbers - up to 8M, up to 24M. Can only be connection speeds not throughputs.

Bulldog did indeed start the 8000 farce, but 2M was never 2M on a speed tester only 1870 - 1900. ADSL has always always been inclusive of some overhead.

I was very happy with the move away from the fixed speed charging regime, it made 2M a lot cheaper and higher speeds economical, even if it's to hard for some to comprehend that it costs no more to provide

A lower speed product would be pointless as it doesn't cost any less to provide - same backhaul, same line, same port cost. I expect we'll see some lower speed products if the ad rules change in order to inflate the % achieved numbers artificially. After all, MaxDSL was built to allow sale of 4M or whatever service based on line capability.

Yes but the consumer wont see it that way and how the consumer see's it is king.

In reality max should either have been provisioned at 8.8mbit or advertised at 7.15mbit (or less), the mistakes all started when adsl max got launched.

You need to get this cost to provide out your head.

I have worked in factories where 2 products come off the same line with different brands and they both sell at very different prices even tho they have the same production costs. Its about supply and demand more than what it costs, and also I have said this to you god knows how many times but you continue to ignore it that the BT wholesale pricing for adsl ports is artifical, it was set that way after ofcom started persuing high takeup. You also ignore that there is more to costs then what an adsl port costs, higher speed users drive up peak time demand which drives up the need for peak capacity.

Ultimately the point of lower speed packages is so people who get a lesser service pay less for it, nothing complicated about it. What it costs to provide shouldnt be relevant. However even what I am saying isnt really relevant to the issue. The issue been that hardly anyone gets close to the advertised up to speeds, which isnt acceptable. Its been a very cutting corner approach to sell broadband and has decimated the business case for FTTx, after all why invest in higher speed infrastructure when you can just pretend its higher than what it is.

My curiousity is why you want to allow this to continue, what do you gain from it?

In reply to a post by tide:

Your post shows exactly what I am up against, people who want to over complicate things, how many of you think you could really put an advert across to people telling them to divide or multiply by a factor of eight and get away with it... never going to happen.

You simply do not know how to talk to the public, but you lot are the ones in charge. Its going to change as connection get faster, before you legitimately got away with this but now we are in the multi-MB internet world and so advertising has to change.

On the contrary, you, as in so many replies to others, are so blinkered and egotistical that you don't even try to understand what has been said.

My post that you damn does not mention multiplying or dividing anything by eight. It does not complicate anything.

It merely tries to show that the number of oranges picked per minute bears no relation to the quantity of orange picked per minute. Similarly that the transmission speed of binary bits bears no relation to the volume of data characters, which is what bytes contain.

As a humorous postscript, the banana reference was to show how futile in the real world that seems so important to you, (that the rest of us live in but you seem to want to alter to some ideal existing in your head rather than adjust to), trying to prevent idiotic new standards being imposed is far more important than trying to do what you are doing - abolish well-proven long-standing ones that happen to be fit for purpose.

Sorry if that sentence taxes your attention-span.

What are your opinions on measuring volumes in terms of London buses, or areas in terms of football pitches, or the latest lunacy where a volume of water flowing down a flooded river per hour was described as 75 Olympic swimming pool contents? Done one can only imagine to help ordinary people form a concept of the quantity.

Utterly stupid.

You argue for clarity in advertising, and do so by suggesting that advertising use a measure that you have been told is incorrect, and has been explained to you why it is incorrect.

A real world, current, example, of how advertising works, in the technology sector.

You go to PC World and buy a one TeraByte Hard Disk Drive. (1TB)

You put it in your PC.

You Format it.

Windows tells you it has 931 GB of available space.

So where has the extra 69 GB gone? (93 GB if you use the binary interpretation of the prefixes)

That's almost 7% of the storage you paid for gone. (almost 10% if you use the binary interpretation of the prefixes)

How can the drive manufacturers get away with this?

Many people will give you many reasons, but the real reason is the drive manufacturers are correct, if deliberately misleading. Windows is wrong. Your 1TB drive has 1TB of storage or 1000GB, but only 931GiB of storage. Windows should change the prefixes it uses as the ones it uses are wrong. They haven't, because those who understand what is going on, know what is going on, and those who don't understand don't care enough to do anything about it.

Your 26MB file you know the size of is 26MiB, which is in fact 27MB.

Advertisers deliberately mislead the public, because they can, but they do so within the confines of having to stick to actual facts. the 1TB hard drive manufacturer would be shot down in flames if he said the drive was 1TiB as this is untrue (but closer to what you would expect to see in windows). If you force advertisers to use a prefix that is inaccurate and undefined how long do you think it would take them to find a way to outright lie to the public by finding a set of stats that suit them?

Your 8Mb service would be sold as 2MB not the 1MB that it is closer to in the real world, because they would use a 4 bit byte (which does exist but is obsolete) instead of the widely accepted 8 bit byte. They may even get away with 8MB if they can find a way to define a 1 bit byte, making the advert even more misleading than it is now.

Lets stick the standard which, although misunderstood by the public at large, is actually a standard.

In reply to a post by tide:

Advertising is there to inform, not educate.

You are right in so far as advertising is not there to educate. But nor is it's purpose to inform, it surves the sole function of selling. That is it is there to convince people (ignorant or otherwise) that the product being advertised is the best. Adverts would outright lie if they could, they are fortunately constrained by legislation to stick to the facts!

In reply to a post by tide:

You, along with the rest of your dinosaur like minded kind, in denial of the needs which citizens feel betrayed by, that is the highest number wins. Its all irrelevant unless a unit can be understood and simply asking people to understand binary (which is the basis of computing) is not going to alleviate this problem.

nothing is going to aleviate this problem because it is not the problem you appear to think it is. The problem isn't that advertisers are using the wrong figure to mislead, and a correct figure is available. The problem is the correct figure is being used to mislead, and the advertisers are damned happy that they don't need to think about the figure they use to mislead. Advertisers are paid to mislead you so that you buy the stuff they are advertising. Giving advertisers free reign to essentially make it up as they go along by making them use the wrong (and ill defined) figure will cheer them up no end.

In reply to a post by tide:

Measuring in MB will happen, it must.

It had better not, because it is the wrong figure, and would complicate things further, not simplify them.

Tide, I see no point having a new understandable measurement, your point in this fails at the point you compare the current. All the average user is concerned about is being able to watch their Eastenders etc, in manner that is not interrupted by buffering, a decent online game experience and add to this the cost of the service. Perhaps all there is needed is a sliding price scale according to profile and top ups for usage.

I consider myself an average user, however your points make little credence with me due to your constant put downs of others. Indeed a black and white view is indicative of a personality disorder (My Field) and may I suggest some cognitive therapy.

Massively long threads are routinely closed, left this one a little longer than I usually do.

If anything of merit is left to say people can carry on, just link back to the post in question.