If you live in a Verizon town, chances are you can't avoid that FiOS commercial with the little kid babbling about how +20 dB hot his true QAM is (even if, like me, you live in an "inner city" neighborhood that will get FiOS in, oh, 2107 or so).
Not being a fiber-optics guy, of course I have no idea what the kid and the not-the-cable guy are babbling about. But that's what the Internet is for, so I quickly found a post by Tom Wright-Piersanti that translates the entire commercial. For example:
All of these wavelengths are totally industry standard, and any provider will use the exact same. So why did Verizon feel like they had to run them off quickly here? Because they are big numbers, and when said in rapid succession they create the illusion that something confusing is happening and your only reaction can be “Ooh, fancy, me wanty numbers.” Don’t get sucked in, remember that all these numbers have no real meaning and are nothing out of the ordinary.
And yes, he explains "true QAM" and why it's truly nothing out of the ordinary these days - even people who can't get FiOS might already be all QAMmed up.
Executive Editor, Online, Network World. Started as a reporter covering messaging (cc:Mail, anyone?) and object-oriented applications (CORBA!).
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Glad someone did this
Makes me feel better to know that the "hot" in "+20dB hot" is apparently completely made up.
And the "true QAM" business made me think I didn't know what QAM was after all.
Also glad that in the comments to that post, people pointed out that it's not "three different spectrums of light" - it's one spectrum, three different wavelengths.
Jeff Caruso
Network World Site Editor
Marketing doing TechnoSpeak
I wonder if Gateway chose to use the same marketing group for its server ads in Network World. They are listing the features of their different servers and they get down to where they tout that the disk drive or the server (I forget which) had 0 (zero!) MTBF. Which sounds good if you do not know that the acronym stands for Mean Time Between Failures. If the average time between failures is zero, then the server or disk drive stack never works. Not exactly something that I would want in my data center!
This is a problem when a marketing group or ad agency tries to push the technobabble without really understanding what it means and the technical reviewers aren't given authority to correct it.
20 dBmmmmmm!
Actually, it has to be 20 dBm! The little "m" makes a big difference. Without the little "m" it's a relative number: meaningless. 20 dBm is an absolute number: 20 dB higher than 1 mW of light.
Only a fiber-optics geek would notice of course.
Nevertheless, its lots of fun to see this commercial on TV. It really brings it home (no pun intended) for us fiber-optics engineers who have been waiting for that "holy grail" for about 20 years.