For what it’s worth, fiber is usually symmetric from what I’ve seen. No idea why the others aren’t.
Edit: So, I found some info about it. According to this post on Super User, for cable (DOCSIS), it’s a bandwidth allocation issue: the physical medium is shared among several different subscribers (everyone in the same neighborhood as you, more or less) and between different devices (both TV and data), so there’s only so much bandwidth allocated to upstream traffic, and that bandwidth can’t be reallocated without breaking compatibility.
Fiber doesn’t seem to suffer from these problems, presumably because it was designed for symmetric throughput from the start.
Side note: besides the upstream speed, one thing I absolutely adore about fiber is that I can use a Linux PC as my router with no special hardware. It just plugs into an Ethernet port on the optical network terminal, requests an address with DHCP, and that’s it. No PPPoE, no special network interface card, no nonsense. I’m going to dearly miss it if I move out of here…
Where I live, only one ISP offers symmetrical connections, but they are not in my building yet. Although they have announced that they are negotiating the rights to come in here.
If ever I can do it. I’ll switch in a heartbeat and self-host a few things.
For what it’s worth, fiber is usually symmetric from what I’ve seen.
No idea why the others aren’t.Edit: So, I found some info about it. According to this post on Super User, for cable (DOCSIS), it’s a bandwidth allocation issue: the physical medium is shared among several different subscribers (everyone in the same neighborhood as you, more or less) and between different devices (both TV and data), so there’s only so much bandwidth allocated to upstream traffic, and that bandwidth can’t be reallocated without breaking compatibility.
Fiber doesn’t seem to suffer from these problems, presumably because it was designed for symmetric throughput from the start.
Side note: besides the upstream speed, one thing I absolutely adore about fiber is that I can use a Linux PC as my router with no special hardware. It just plugs into an Ethernet port on the optical network terminal, requests an address with DHCP, and that’s it. No PPPoE, no special network interface card, no nonsense. I’m going to dearly miss it if I move out of here…
Where I live, only one ISP offers symmetrical connections, but they are not in my building yet. Although they have announced that they are negotiating the rights to come in here.
If ever I can do it. I’ll switch in a heartbeat and self-host a few things.