New USB-C Logos Make Picking USB Cables, Chargers Less Confusing (pcworld.com) 87
Choosing the correct USB-C charger and cable for you laptop is about as fun as visiting the dentist, but new logos released today should go a long way toward making easier. PCWorld: The USB Implementers Forum group that oversees the USB standard has released logos that easily indicate whether a cable or charger can hit the new 240 watt rating. Previous USB-C chargers and cables were rated to hit 65 watts or 100 watts but a new version of USB Power Delivery released this May has pushed the limit to an impressive 240 watts. Obviously, that means if you're looking for a 240 watt aftermarket charger for a new gaming laptop that supports it, you want one. With the new USB-C logos, all you have to do is look for a Certified USB Charger 240W logo with a lightning bolt like the one from the chart above. The other component you may need is a 240 watt USB-C cable, so consumers need only look for Certified USB Charger 240W with a cable in its logo. Both logos also can also be paired with USB 40Gbps bits to indicate if the cable is certified to support USB4's 40Gbps speed.
The higher output 240 watt power range is a welcome addition to USB-C as it should allow laptop makers to bringing universal USB-C charging to far more powerful laptops, including gaming laptops with discrete graphics chips -- something that was out of reach of the previous USB-C chargers, cables, and ports. In fact, we found that we probably wouldn't want to use a small USB-C charger in a gaming laptop with today's technology. With 240 watt USB-C charger, we'd probably change our mind. The problem, of course, is that the USB-IF is an organization that certifies cables, chargers, and USB-C brick a brats, but it's not mandatory. This has lead to small brand and no-name manufacturers getting the spec wrong in the past. The good news is the cables from companies that actually obtain certifications correctly should work correctly.
The higher output 240 watt power range is a welcome addition to USB-C as it should allow laptop makers to bringing universal USB-C charging to far more powerful laptops, including gaming laptops with discrete graphics chips -- something that was out of reach of the previous USB-C chargers, cables, and ports. In fact, we found that we probably wouldn't want to use a small USB-C charger in a gaming laptop with today's technology. With 240 watt USB-C charger, we'd probably change our mind. The problem, of course, is that the USB-IF is an organization that certifies cables, chargers, and USB-C brick a brats, but it's not mandatory. This has lead to small brand and no-name manufacturers getting the spec wrong in the past. The good news is the cables from companies that actually obtain certifications correctly should work correctly.
Why so many? (Score:3)
Re:Why so many? (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably because the best cable is expensive, and you don't want nor need a 240W 40Gb/s cable for your mouse. Especially if it costs halt as much as the mouse.
I'm all for active controllers on buses, but . . .
Remember that USB's power negotiation protocol is INSANE.
It's literally an incompatible re-invention of Ethernet. With literal controllers in the damn *connectors* that could have been your computer's main CPU when I was a kid.
Somebody should make a parody USB6 or so video, where the cable is nothing by miniaturized EPYC chiplets stacked on top with flexible leads and glue until it forms a "wire", and then wrapped in a double layer of tube with water cooling in-between. Now imagine the connectors! ;)
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With literal controllers in the damn *connectors* that could have been your computer's main CPU when I was a kid.
You have to go very very obscure to get an MCU that's slower than the computer you had as a kid. I had a BBC Micro, with a 6502. Fastest instructions ran at 1MHz, for the 2 cycle ones, most were slower. A 50p DIP packaged PIC 10F200 chugs along at 4MHz off its internal oscillator with every instruction being single cycle. Pay a whole pound for an attiny 85 and you get 20MHz single cycle. Even th
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Wait, wat? Without looking up the datasheet for that specific device, 4MHz osc -> FDEW -> 1MHz instruction timing.
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Wait, wat? Without looking up the datasheet for that specific device, 4MHz osc -> FDEW -> 1MHz instruction timing.
FDEW?
Not sure what you mean. IME, the low end PICs 10f, 12f, 16f series were all single cycle fully static, so one clock corresponds to one instruction.
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I guess if you have 1:1 mapping then either the core is fully static
Yep, the low end PICs are all fully static.
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FDEW?
Not sure what you mean. IME, the low end PICs 10f, 12f, 16f series were all single cycle fully static, so one clock corresponds to one instruction.
That is right, but the clock input is divided by 4 to get the CPU clock, which to me always implied that internally a 4-phase clock was used for instruction timing, like a Z80. Instruction execution is single cycle in the sense that all instruction take one cycle to execute, except for branches of course.
Re:Why so many? (Score:5, Informative)
Remember that USB's power negotiation protocol is INSANE.
No. It's flexible and flexibility breeds complexity. Calling it insane just means you either don't understand what it does, how it does it or what the design goal was. In reality the negotiation protocol is trivially simple:
1. Source checks e-marker of the cable
2. Cable replies if it has an e-marker with its capabilities.
3. Source states to sink what it and the cable can do.
4. Sink requests power.
5. Source confirms request.
6. Sink issues a ready signal.
And a CRC is issued between each to confirm receipt.
That's it. The only thing truly insane would be to skip any of those steps.
It's literally an incompatible re-invention of Ethernet.
I'd call you ignorant, but really what's the point anymore. Everyone already knows it. The only thing it shares in common is the 4b5b line code, a coding structure that predated ethernet by 15 years and was used by a variety of communications devices including digital audio well before ethernet even came along. Literally everything else, voltages, signaling, coding, packet structure, timing, is different from ethernet.
It's about as dumb as saying a car is the same as a spaceship because it allows you to get from one place to another.
With literal controllers in the damn *connectors* that could have been your computer's main CPU when I was a kid.
Technology really must blow your mind sometimes. Hint: They don't need CPUs that powerful in the cables, they use them because they are cheap and literally cost cents to purchase at volumes. I too have given up on 8bit slow microcontrollers because buying 32bit ARM chips is so much cheaper.
Also basic PD negotiation is trivial, and only high power cables need an e-marker. Please let people who know what they are doing deal with the engineering. I don't want my house to burn down because you were involved.
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You don't need the insane parts for the necessary flexibility.
It's massively over-engineered. That's my point. It seems you did not understand that.
A good analog example would be a plain text editor... implemented on Electron. ... You know... an entire OS/platform/browser, just to edit... plain text.
Yeah, it's flexible. You can literally play 3D games and run virtualized Linux in it. But that's what makes it insane!
It reminds me of a post on thedailywtf.com. Of some consultant being especially "enterprisey"
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It's massively over-engineered. That's my point. It seems you did not understand that.
Except it's not. There's nothing remotely over engineered about it given its flexibility. Stop trying to burn my house down by cutting corners. Let us engineers who know what we're doing do our job.
A good analog example would be a plain text editor... implemented on Electron.
It seems you understand Electron. Sadly you seem to have no idea about USB-PD or why the E-markers exist. Stick to your Javascript, this electrical stuff is too complicated for you.
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Not really, I mean USB controllers are so cheap now that you can get a functional optical mouse for a Euro. As for computing power, there are 10 cent microcontrollers that are more powerful than some of the 8 bit machines of my youth. That's progress for you.
The power delivery negotiation is fine. It's not like many people will actually have to implement it anyway, a handful of chip manufacturers will built it in to their products, certify them and that's it, job done. Throw one on your PCB and it just work
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Hate to tell you but that 1EUR optical mouse is subsidized by China's job creation schemes.
Same reason they are building entire cities for seven million people that aren't even populated, and crumble to pieces before even a million was convinced to move in.
They *need* us to buy their shit, to keep it going. Job creation schemes are a typical flaw of a fake-communism economy.
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Remember that USB's power negotiation protocol is INSANE.
The only people who care are the ones making USB power supplies.
Consumers? We couldn't care less.
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Speak for yourself.
With "consumers" you clearly mean "retards".
There are far more of those where you live, clearly.
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Hell most sold "USB-C" cables can't even handle the 100W minimum capacity or 10GBs, which is why they don't even have the logo.
Uncomprehensible Serial Bus (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to love USB-C, and I do in a way. Never before has my laptop, phone and several other devices all had the same port. I am so close to having a travel bag with only one type of cable in it but my god, the USB-IF really needs to abandon it's hands-off approach and dictate some standards here.
Does my cable support 60W, 100W, 240W?
Is it USB2, USB3, USB3.1, USB3.2, USB4 with 10gbps or USB4 with 40gbps?
Does it support Thunderbolt or not? Is it active or passive?
You cannot expect non-technical consumers to separate the port from the protocol.
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That doesn't work. Expensive doesn't mean latest specs. Generally has to do more with brand recognition.
Unbelievably Stupid Bastards (Score:3)
Just when you think they can't fuck it up more... now they are setting you up to have your kids cheap device burn down your house while you are sleeping the whole time blaming the consumer for buying the wrong device.
Why not make USB5 have the same plug as 120AC and eliminate that confusion?
One plug to rule us all and in the darkness burn them!
Obviously, you don't plug USB5 into AC because it has a logo on it which everybody should know means you can't do that!
It's like some moron was trying to put a cube i
Re: Unbelievably Stupid Bastards (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/2493/ [xkcd.com]
Time for USB-D (Score:3)
It can have seven modes with names that make the distinction clear: Huge, Big, Large, Macro, Advanced, Sizable, and Grossen, with the first one called Enhanced followed by Extended and then Improved.
They could all have star logos. A five pointed star, a smaller seven pointed star, a star without any points at all, etc.
What could be clearer than that?
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Not to mention that they're using a lightning bolt logo to represent this new charging standard, which I'm sure won't be at all confusing. After all, it's not as if there's an existing standard—say, Thunderbolt—that operates over USB-C and has been using a lightning bolt logo for far longer. Surely that won't confuse consumers in the least.
I mean, I wish they weren't hands-off as well, but I'm not at all convinced these yahoos could do it any better if they put their hands on the wheel and actua
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These are the same geniuses that decided that a "Hi-speed" port was faster than a "Full-speed" port.
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You haven't seen the upcoming "Flank-speed" specs?
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That's because it was intended to be a low speed low bandwidth protocol with low hardware overhead suitable for underpowered CPUs. Replace mouse, keyboard, and printer cables; that was all. Then someone wanted to piggy back something else using the same cable. Then later something else with extra pins in the same connector, then something else with a different connector, and oh boy, we now have something completely unrelated in every way to the original but we can still keep the same name and logo! Mark
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I love buses with active controllers more.
USB is the result of the race to the bottom. The shitty cheap-out solution with a protocol so bad it wastes half its speed, and abysmally bad joke connectors that are designed to not be able to last and to be annoying.
So it's good that USB4 is actually Thunderbolt, and has AFAIK active controllers. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Round connectors are still better, just like round cables. You can rotate them however you want, they still work. And round is the strongest sha
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This is all true, but once the dust settles and people know what to buy, the *charging* situation will be glorious. And tbh most people don't give a flying fuck about USB-C data transfer speeds - as long as they can get a PDF or similar 10MB file from A to B in an emergency they're fine, and that'll work perfectly with the lowest supported data transfer standard.
I've already got a single 65W charger with two USB C ports and a USB A port on it for travel. I can charge ALL my stuff with it, from the laptops (
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Here's a hint: Don't penny pinch, buy a nice cable advertised with an e-marker and move on with your life.
Honestly your complaints in the eyes of users is irrelevant. The few applications which require high power or high speeds are usually shipped with suitable cables. Just use them.
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Ah yes, because the advertisements at your typical e-tailer never lie!
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I said NICE cable. I didn't say get the cheapest cable from Aple, Bilkin or Googel you can find with an e-market from Amazon. I've never seen nor heard of a reputable brand cable not working. But if you want to experience the satisfaction of something you buy actually doing what it says, it'll cost you Dollars or Euros not Yuan.
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It's actually not that bad. A certified USB C cable will support USB 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2, and power delivery up to 100W. The tricky part is figuring out what a particular machine has, although in practice it's not that bad because devices will just use the best available speed and power. In other words they will at least work, just maybe not as fast as you would like.
Thunderbolt is a separate thing. USB 4 will include it, but until USB 4 it was not part of the USB standard so you can't really blame them f
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I shouldn't worry - give it a few months and pretty much every cable on Amazon from the crappiest to the best will have the Certified 240W logo, and quite probably the USB4 one too. Then it'll all be easy ;-)
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I am eyeing to replace all my type-C cables with Thunderbolt 4 certified ones. Granted I have zero TB4 devices (USB and TB3 only at the moment), however at least I will know it will be able to carry usb + video + power at the highest capacities. The downside is they are expensive and very short.
Half Solved... (Score:2)
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According to TFA (I know, I know), yes, there are also logos for cables indicating speed and power.
This is a solution to a non-problem (Score:5, Informative)
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That's what trademarks are for. USB-IF needs to get ICE to step up enforcement of banning imports of knockoffs.
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"USB-IF needs to get ICE to step up enforcement of banning imports of knockoffs."
What have Internal Combustion Engines got to do with it?
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This is an absolute problem- trying to push so much power through an under-rated cable poses a serious fire hazard. At the higher power, the cables have to be electronically marked- if not, no power delivery device will try to push that much power. I expect with the liability involved, there may be some crypto involved (Though there is no crypto involved in the 100W e-marked cabled). I really kinda hope there is some valid cryptography in these- at least to weed out the really low-budget counterfeits.
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With an active protocol you could have both devices on either end do a resistance test to see how much heat is being generated, but of course shanzai charger plugs could be made that give inaccurate measurements. (And of course the safety margin would have to assume short cable lengths)
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And then Amazon mixes real cables and counterfeits in the same bin...
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Establishing trust in a logo program is not an easy thing.
I'd go one step further and say in a world of consumers demanding cheap shit from China it's outright impossible. I've lost count of the number of fake CE / UL logos I've seen. It's flat out not possible to establish a trusted certification scheme or even labelling scheme in a world free of consequences for applying those logos fraudulently.
Maybe sometime in 3021 when we have a one world government, a house burning down in the New York, Planet Earth will result in some fraudster located in Guangzhou, Planet
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Maybe sometime in 3021 when we have a one world government, a house burning down in the New York, Planet Earth will result in some fraudster located in Guangzhou, Planet Earth being arrested and charged. Then we have a chance of logos working.
I suspect most of us alive today believe that the more likely scenario is that in 3021 we will be bartering radioactive squirrel meat for our last few remaining shotgun shells.
Finally someone is setting a standard. (Score:2)
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
Problem in article- thundebolt not on ipads? (Score:2)
" You won’t find them in any phone or Android or iOS tablet, only in Windows or Mac laptops."
um.. April, 2021
https://www.cnet.com/tech/comp... [cnet.com]
am I mistaken?
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yea I am... went on to another article... oops
So which is better? (Score:2)
Still confusing (Score:2)
Re:Still confusing (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you have a laptop that isn't USB-C chargable, you can probably make an adapter. Most charge on 20V or there about. If it's 19V it will still be okay, wouldn't go more than a volt lower.
Check the power rating. If it's less than 100W at 19-20V you can buy a little adapter board off eBay that takes USB C in and puts out 20V at up to 5A. Grab a dead PSU (again eBay is good for this if you don't have one), hack the cable off and solder it to the adapter board. Either make an enclosure or use heat shrink for a
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If you have a laptop that isn't USB-C chargable, you can probably make an adapter. Most charge on 20V or there about. If it's 19V it will still be okay, wouldn't go more than a volt lower.
I'm stuck on the first part of this sentence, i.e. "how do I tell?" - simply plugging in a USB-C charger and seeing what happens seems ... foolhardy. And sure, I've got some of those USBC-PD adapter boards kicking around here for powering various homebrew projects (it's so much more convenient than the box of random wall warts that I'd normally have), but the whole reason I am interested in asking the original question is: I want to carry just one piece of charging equipment, one cable, and be assured that
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Look on the charger, it will have a sticker that gives the output voltage and amps.
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I think I understand. You have a laptop with a USB C port and you don't know if you can charge via that port.
What I'm saying is that either way you can use the laptop's original charging port with a USB C charger. It's not quite as nice, you do need a custom cable, but at least you only need one charger for everything.
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Well the good news is that plugging in a USB C charger should be fine. If the port was properly designed it should be able to accept chargers even if it can't actually charge with them.
Prior to USB C they relied on the connector physically preventing you plugging a charger into a host port and damaging something, but with USB C where the connectors are the same on both ends they obviously couldn't do that and had to rely on electronics and intelligence within the port hardware to handle it.
You can see it in
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"Brick a brats"? (Score:2)
Come tf on, PC World. It's bric-a-brac. If you're writing for a deadline, maybe stick to terms you know. Like "crap".
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Re: "Brick a brats"? (Score:2)
I remember browsing deal-extreme (one of the early free shipping direct-from-China sites) fifteen years ago or so and seeing a USB-powered coffee warmer and thinking "wow, it'll never get geekier than that". My, how times have changed.
240W is not going to help Apple in Europe (Score:2)
Clickbait trash (Score:2)
Just buy quality cables and you'll be fine. If you are a consumer who needs thunderbolt cables, you'll know to go buy those. If you need thunderbolt 4 cables, you'll know to go buy those.
:shrug: Otherwise I've never had an issue. But people ke
In six years of using usb-c almost exclusively (been waiting for the Kindle to finally get USB-C, which just happened two weeks ago) the only time i've ever had an issue was trying to use an Apple power cord as a usb-c cable. Turns out those don't support data
From the article... (Score:5, Informative)
Newer 240 watt USB-C chargers and cables will allow many gaming laptops to finally ditch the funky barrel DC in plug.
At our school, we had Dell 3120 and 3180 Chromebooks, which used Dell's old tried-and-true 7.4mm barrel DC plug. It didn't care if it pushed 30w or 180w. And over five years, we only ever had one barrel end broken.
Last summer (and in just one summer, mind you), we threw away 17 USB-C chargers (out of 450 total) due to damaged ends alone. Bent, broken, twisted, ripped, rolled over, wedged into a door stop...there's so many ways to destroy the thing. And once it's destroyed, there's no good way to replace the end. (Yes, I've tried, both by buying solder-it-yourself ends on Amazon, and trying to splice and solder good replacement ends onto them. My success rate is about 30%. I've concluded it's not worth the time.)
Bring back barrel chargers any day. The cables only have three conductors in them, same as the old Dell 7.4mm barrel DC plug. (Sometimes there's four, if you have a status-LED in the cable head, but that's not a necessity.) For the sake of reducing waste, either bring back the barrel chargers, or at least require OEMs to put a female USB-C port on the AC-DC adapter body, making the USB-C cable replaceable.
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Ya, nothing wrong with barrel chargers, except that there are so many varieties. So that doesn't get solved by having yet one more variety. The barrel charger means you need no negotiation at all and it won't fit into other data slots where 10-24V might damage something and essentially it just does the job and does it well.
The reason manufacturers want USB-C as a charger is to save space, not because it's inherently a better charger.
Re:From the article.. (Score:2)
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Ya, nothing wrong with barrel chargers, except that there are so many varieties.
That's not my experience. I'm not sure when it happened but at some point everyone with 12 VDC started using one of two barrel connectors, which I only know of as "big" and "small" as I've seen no reason to look up their precise dimensions. Most 5 VDC things I run into use that same "small" connector I see with 12 VDC items, so some care must be taken if the power supply is separated from the device it is supposed to power. I noticed that the 20 VDC Thunderbolt hubs I bought recently appear to use the sa
Nah, I'll just wait for the USB-C 1024W cable (Score:2)
because it is so frickin huge that is must be way faster than all those 240W cables.
Who wants something inferior?
Sorry to be positive... (Score:2)
... but I actually did find some USB-C cables that I don't strongly dislike.
And I've been buying USB cables since an iMac prototype landed on my desk.
Here: https://amzn.to/3F7lbsM [amzn.to]
I'm on my third set of five, throwing out the junk cables that have been headaches (especially the Ankers I spent far too much money on).
Back in the day I worked for a big mail-order computer warehouse company and because of my job I could see the cost and sale prices of cables. A $42 SCSI cable had a cost of $3.50, from one of th
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Not confusing at all... (Score:2)
Just look for cables that may or may not be labelled "CERTIFIED." ...or maybe 20Gbps ...or maybe 60W.
Just look for cables that may or may not be labelled "240W."
Just look for cables that may or may not be labelled "40Gbps."
Yes, not confusing at all. /s
Confusing mix of Gbps and W labelling (Score:2)
Problem: for a cable that is certified for only one of the two (Gbps or wattage), the labeling is exactly the same, with a number followed by either "Gbps" or "W". Being educated on the difference, this is no issue for me. But someone who is not tech-savvy, they will see a number, and compare with whatever number they know they are supposed to have.
Labeling should be such that when present, it states both the power and transmission rate rating, and if anyone does not apply, it should have "N/A" or something