I thought it was pretty well understood, to anybody paying attention at least, that there have been no official 6, 7, 8, or even 9G mobile networks yet, so of course 10G was a slightly quicker name for 10Gbps networking. It's maybe not an industry standard, but colloquially many datacenters will call a 10Gbps-capable network switch a "10G switch." This seems like an extension of that colloquialism to general consumers. But I guess I won't argue, necessarily, about being less vague in our choices of words for things. I just generally don't think accusations of "misleading" is completely fair, in this instance. Comcast has been misleading customers in other ways, but in this case, I think individual ignorance is doing a bit of the heavy lifting for the misleading here.
It wasn't long ago that 5G was the new shiny thing, and I remember that the flood of ads for cell carriers were constantly saying that they had the newest 5G ultra-wideband tech or whatever. Even the vast majority of my relatives know that 5G is the latest *G thing. Very few people would miss 4 G's.
I hate to advocate for Comcast of all companies, but I'm actually on their side for once. They definitely should've had their employees explain what it meant to people if they seemed unsure, which I have serious doubts about, and saying they have a "10G network" when availability for 10G is very limited is rather dubious, but calling 10Gbps internet "10G" is fine with me.
If we're gonna go after ISPs for shady shit, why not go after Spectrum for not listing their upload speed anywhere, not even for their business plans? Comcast at least lets you see what you're actually buying before paying, but with Spectrum you just have to try it out or do some google-fu to find a PDF listing the upload speed for some* of their business plans, and then just hope that ths speeds are the same on the nearly-equivalent consumer plans.
If you don't know what a 10G network in a given context could be, are you likely to understand the difference between what a 5g and a supposed 10g mobile network would be? Are you a candidate for a person that is likely to care about the difference between 200Mbps and 1Gbps? Perhaps it's naive, but I've heard the words "rack that 10G switch" so many times that it's hard for me to say that Comcast intended on being misleading.
My sister in law insists that 5Ghz wifi is the same thing as a 5G cell network. Comcast shouldn't use misleading terminology. The fact that people don't know what 5g means isn't really a defense. I couldn't tell you the difference between 4g and 5g, but adding "10g" alongside them makes it worse, not better.
This is what happens when we allow Marketing to simply conjure up a unit of measurement. Now nobody knows what a "G" is and how to compare one company's "G" with another company's "G". I fully expect AT&T to offer 20G cell service next because why the hell not?
Same thing happened with CDROM speeds back in the day. At one point 1X, 2X, 3X and so on were based on an actual throughput number, but then soon the Marketing brain trust realized you could put whatever number you want before the "X" and then the number became pretty meaningless.
Same for "bars" on your cell phone service signal. What is the difference between "one bar" and "two bars" on the display? Who the hell knows, it's a meaningless unit invented by carrier company Marketing.
"Hey honey, I called Verizon and they have the 1G service for $79.99"
"I called up T-mobile home internet, and they can give us the 5G for $50"
"Looks like Xfinity has the 10G for $79.95"
The vast majority of people buying internet service are non-technical, misunderstandings about the details are common, and Comcast picked a name that is perfect for confusing with all of their competitors. People don't always know what these measurements really mean, but they know that a bigger one should mean faster internet.
I think a lot more laypeople know the words "100 megabit" and "gigabit speed" than know anything about what 5G mobile service means. So let's leave mobile service aside. That was never my complaint.
I think some laypeople see the marketing materials companies put out comparing one speed and price tier to another. In other words, a fair number of people who have actively price-shopped internet speed ("should I buy the 'fast' tier that says 100 somethings, or the 'boost' tier that's 200, twice as much, for 50% more money?") would think 10G means 10 times as much as 1G which, it's not a huge leap to think that a fair number of people are aware means 1000 of the Ms.
Does their device at least support 10Gbps internal networks, I assume? In that way it's still not misleading, in my opinion. Of course the uplink only receives and transmits whatever you pay for (or in that case, what they allow you to pay for based on what is available.)
For their fiber gigabit pro (2+1 gigabit symmetric service) they lease you something like a juniper acx2100, so presumably something similar with an SFP+ port would be used for higher speed fiber plans.
Granted that's just a handoff so I'm pretty sure you're just on your own when it comes to picking something that can route at 10G. I just went with a decisio opnsense appliance and called it a day.
Who officially decides what is xG?
The number of different technologies and expected speeds varies so much with 4G/5G, that the terms aren’t particularly useful anyway.
On the contrary, I'm simply tossing up whether or not you're likely to care about the difference between 10G and 10Gbps if you don't understand what either one even mean. Are we mad at Comcast for misleading people that don't even know where (or from where) they were led? Or are we mad at Comcast for not using the technical term since we're all tech minded here?
Where this XKCD comic is about experts overestimating the knowledge of average people, I'm attempting to estimate how much the average person should even care, in this case.
