2G, 3G, 4G, 5G mobile data made some sense as it represents generational leaps in the technology itself but then Xfinity wants to advertise "10g" internet...
Comcast says it represents a 10 Gigabit cable internet network they are building (it doesn’t exist) so they are basically changing the meaning of the g from generation to gig to act like 10g is 5 generations better (or twice as fast)…or that they have a 10 gigabit network. Neither is accurate. It’s still just cable internet that people have to use because they have no other option.
Fuck Comcast.
I read online they are abandoning the “confusing” 10g branding but I just saw a commercial for it. They think all of their customers are morons and count on folks having no other choices in a lot of cases.
Apologies to anyone outside the United States, this is just complaining about our poor internet options and deceptive advertising by greedy corporations.
Screen manufacturers just did a similar thing with the jump from 1080p to 4k
The 1080 part of the original number referred to the number of pixels from top to bottom, 4k refers to left to right. 4k is actually only 2160 from top to bottom though (at the same aspect ratio).
So they quadrupled the number when it should have only doubled, and it was entirely a marketing thing.
I don't disagree with the change either. Having a large number makes it more difficult to compare. After 2160 it's 4320. 2k, 4k, and 8k are far easier to remember and figure out the differences.
In my past life I was a video editor while 4k was still at its infancy, and my coworker was furious saying that reporters were idiots for saying that 4K was 4 times the size of HD, it was just the name. And I'm like, dude is actually 4 times more and show him a picture of the size comparison of both and he was really ashamed, but I told him it was ok because I was also thinking the same until I read an article about it.
Exactly. The up tick in resolution was slow, 360 to 480 to 720 to 1080. Relatively small improvements. Then we jump to 2160/4k and the resolution goes up by 400% from the previous 1080. 4k is 4x1080 screens put together.
If 4k is four times the pixel count of 1080, then 2k means 1440 (-ish, it should be 1530) - that's fine. But then 8k must be 3050, but it is actually 4320!!!
So it can not refer to the number of pixels (quadratic scaling). On the other hand, if we assume linear scaling and 8k is 4320 and 4k is 2160, then 2k is 1080 - but 2k is never used in that context!
Edit: as you can see I'm very passionate about this XD
The slight difference between the ratios is why home releases of films often have small black bars at the top and bottom, as the DCI flat ratio is slightly different than 16:9.
Why marketers are allowed to label the speed of a network is just beyond me as an engineer. Call it whatever you want. "Our Purple speed". Don't care. But underthat it should be labeled with a standard 1gbps/1gbps.
That would shut up xfinity's bullshit claims pretty quick. "Our new Plaid speed fiber" 200mbps/4mbps
Seriously I called them years ago asking about fiber, they were real hyped, they bragged they could give me 800! 800 what I asked. Megabytes! Megabytes or Megabits? 800 Megabits, okay fine, symmetric right? Well, no one uses upload anyway. That was their literal response.
I talked about this in another thread recently, but my favorites are the ones that are so lopsided that you literally can't send back ACKs fast enough to keep up with your own download speeds when using TCP.
I've had that! Upload so bad that I couldn't even send out a request! Even the DNS requests failed. "But you have download available". Yes, mr customer service, but how does it know what to download?
The K refers to horizontal resolution though. The Resolution used for cinema are 2048x1080 aka DCI 4K and 4096x2160 aka DCI 4K. TV manufacturers thought it would be fun to market UHD aka 3840x2160 as 4K, which it isn’t. It‘d be 3.8K if you’d have to label it like that.
And 4K isn‘t even correct in the horizontal direction. "4K" TVs have a horizontal resolution of 3840 pixels. That’s 3.8K. True 4K, as used in movie production (aka DCI 4K) is 4096x2160
2160p is not that uncommon though. Saying 4K is just an abbreviation and it's easier to say while still letting everyone know what you're talking about. I don't actually like the term 4K though because it's a bit ambiguous because of how many different flavors of 4K there are.
It's actually even worse. They tried to pass off 2048x1080 as a big upgrade over 1920x1080 by marketing it as "2K". It didn't work, but locked marketing into using the horizontal resolution.