16 July 2012

Wifi speeds misleading

The Australian telecoms industry is stifled and deliberately holding back on technology from the general public through the monopoly of Telstra.
Even though external operators are able to setup mobile telecoms towers, to allow for alleged competition, they are ultimately connected to the Telstra owned copper cabling.
The general populous are misled by fraudulent telco advertising as to what speeds can be expected from the company or equipment. This information is kept away from the masses, but well known to the telco, as they are the ones who allocate the resources i.e. speed and bandwidth.
Whilst new products are on the market at a rapid rate, the masses are deliberately mislead as to what performance to expect from them.
Vodafone has been in the technical spotlight, for all the wrong reasons. Poor network performance, constant dropouts, substandard data speeds have been the gripe of many customers across Australia.

As a result Vodafone have been losing customers at a rate of over 300 per day. In typical corporate fashion of misinformation Vodafone have been denying any difficulties.
A recent media campaign informed the masses that Vodafone is updating their equipment, network towers in order to win back customers, in effect acknowleding customer's gripes.
Telcos are very coy about informing the public about the product specifications or branding / models of the hardware they package as their own.
The current pocket wifi 2 (Huawei E585u-82) still available has a minor technical update over the superseeded pocket wifi (E585) with a premium price tag, but both still share the same maximum theoretical download speeds of 7.2 Mega bits per second.

A recent product that is promoted by Vodafone is the new pocket wifi pro, which is from the manufacturer's Huawei E585 family of mobile broadband devices, which has a theoretical maximum speed of 21Mbps.
These speeds by the device are not only unobtainable, but through tower limitations, network congestion, bandwidth overselling only a fraction of the speed is seen by the customer.
The telco industry in Australia is a multi billion dollar industry, of which some portion of this revenue is attributed to deliberately misleading information given to the masses in order to obtain sales.
Government organisations like the consumer watchdog (ACCC) or the ombudsman (TIO) are supposedly there to protect the public from fraud.
Not only to these organisations not act in an acceptable time frame, but also if any comany is fined, the fines are so pitiful, that it is worth the fine from the fraudulently obtained funds through sales.
Currently there is no benefit, nor any advantage on the Vodafone's network to justify the purchase of their current offering the pocket wifi pro.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Get your technical wording correct wifi and wireless wan (WWAN) are different technologies. And you cannot say wifi is misleading when what you should be saying is Wireless WAN is misleading..