Reasons To Hesitate On Zer01's Unlimited Mobile Offer 122
alphadogg writes with an excerpt from Network World that might save you some money: "Imagine downloading a two-hour HD movie in three minutes to your new cell phone, then plugging the phone into your TV to watch the film. Make unlimited phone calls, surf online as much as you like and send unlimited text messaging for $70 a month, without a contract. Sign up to sell the same service to other people and get $10 a month for each person you sell to.
That's what a group of related companies including Zer01 Mobile, Buzzirk, Global Verge and Unified Technologies Group are promoting heavily online and at industry trade shows. The offer is attractive enough to garner coverage in top business and technology publications, at least one positive review from an analyst and even a 'best in show' award from a magazine at the CTIA wireless industry trade show earlier this year. Does it all sound too good to be true? If so, that's because it probably is. What little information is available about the services is technically inconsistent, and doesn't match up with public records."
Ars Technica was a little skeptical too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The laws of physics called (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The laws of physics called (Score:1, Informative)
5GB in 3 minutes is not even close to 200MB/sec... it's not even 200Mbps. It's 27MB/sec, and to me that's a lot more plausible than any of the rest of your comment holding water after failing to approximate basic arithmetic by a full order of magnitude.
Re:The laws of physics called (Score:3, Informative)
doing the math, that's 45.5 MB/s, pretty much the sustained data transfer rates of a SATA hard disk.
and that over a wireless link, right ?
I hate to bust their scam, but you're gonna need a very special, fine tunned setup to get this kind of transfer rates over _wired_ gigabit ethernet. the fastest wireless standard is 54 mbps (not counting draft standards), 1/20th the performance of gigabit. to transfer an SD movie over wireless from my linux notebook to the PS3 takes about 30 min.
if we take the comparativelly slow data rates of HSDPA 3G cell networks, even the best operators top at 14 Mbps, which would require buffering to watch a standard def movie.
to get the kind of speeds these guys are talking about, they'd have to use link aggregation/trunking to combine almost 100 HSDPA channels to match gigabit ethernet's speed. completelly unrealistic.
Re:It's funny, and a bit disturbing... (Score:4, Informative)
I kept hearing things about some site called "Google", so I tried running it through SiteTruth. Turns out it's some shady, fly-by-night company.
Yes, Google is in the doghouse again. [sitetruth.com] Google is hosting some phishing sites, which were reported to PhishTank. SiteTruth blacklists any domain with a hit in PhishTank. On any given day, about 50 to 100 well-known domains (out of the 1.5 million in OpenDirectory) are on the blacklist, [sitetruth.com] generally because of sloppy security. Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay used to be on the phishing blacklist, but after some nagging by us and The Register, they've mostly plugged the security holes involved. The blacklist is updated every 3 hours, so companies that clean up their act quickly don't stay on the list for long.
Domains on the blacklist are usually 1) free hosting services, 2) URL redirectors like TinyURL, 3) DSL providers with weak abuse departments, and 4) sites with a software bug that lets other sites use them as a redirector. Some companies in those categories are good at quickly cleaning out such abuses; others just don't seem to care. In each category, there are plenty of companies who don't have such problems, so there's no reason to give anybody a free pass.
It says something about a company's abuse department if they're on that list for more than a day or two.