Just to prioritize download in limited bandwidth cables. Like a neighborhood might get 2Gbps total, but instead of doing 1 down 1 up they instead do 1.8 down and .2 up, then split that amongst a bunch of houses.

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…

Because they can. Most people’s typical usage isn’t impacted by low uplink bandwidth. Very few people are uploading 4K content or live streaming or hosting a high traffic webserver from their garage. Less bandwidth means less expense, thus more profit. Capitalism, baby.

In the old world of the internet, people didn’t upload much anyway.

Nobody worked from home. Nobody had their phones constantly syncing photos and videos to 1 (or often more) clouds. And even then, the photos and videos that you could take digitally were very low resolution and not very large files. Game consoles weren’t online by default until Xbox Gen 1 (and as an add on for GC and PS2) and PC gamers were a minority (and rarely direct peer-to-peer).

That has changed, and nobody forced ISPs to keep up. In a lot of markets, the Cable ISP is a monopoly and they don’t have to do shit about it.

@dingus @worfamerryman On DSL you have a limited set of frequencies that you can use for either upload or download. So you have to split these frequencies between upload and download. Also the DSL speed is highly depending on the length of the copper between your home and the switch cabinet on the street. (Just remember: DSL is the transmission of high frequencies over unshielded cables that never meant to transmit high frequencies) So the longer the cable, the lower the total possible bandwidth. And most people have a demand for a higher download than upload. So most people will prefer some 16 down, 2 up instead of 8 down and 8 up.

The average US household has something like 2.5 people in it. It’s safe to assume (statistically) that at least two of those people are old enough to consume web content unsupervised.

Then there are edge cases that aren’t quite so crazy, like 5 person households where everyone is over the age 14.

So yeah, for one person 50/10 is likely just fine. But for the average household 100/15 is likely closer to baseline.

50/10

good enough to be usable

On a post about how ISPs are literally fucking us all over, overcharging for the most basic connections that are far behind other countries and all you have to say is iT’s UsAbLe lmao

Youre advocating for the SLOWEST avg speed in the nation

Americans are getting nearly 200 Mbps in download speed, but are you?

https://www.allconnect.com/blog/us-internet-speeds-globally

As of May 2023, Ookla’s Speedtest.net shows Americans are getting over 200 Mbps of download speed and about 23 Mbps of upload speed through their fixed broadband connections — good for 6th in the world for median fixed broadband speeds. Considering “fast internet speeds” are generally defined as any download speed above 100 Mbps, Americans are doing quite well by this measure.

In fact, according to a recent Allconnect data report, 9 in 10 households can access at least 100 Mbps speeds.

That’s an incredible improvement from just under a decade ago when the U.S. had an average download speed of just 31 Mbps. In 2013, America ranked 25th among 39 nations for broadband speed.

Sub-100 is not good enough by most standards these days around the world. 50 is not even double the fastest speeds from TEN years ago

We as consumers and citizens deserve better, especially as working from home continues to be a popular and realistic option and our global culture continues to be directly tied to internet culture/media/content.

One major AAA game update will likely break your connection for hours for all intents and purposes.

Bitrate of a 1440p youtube video is going to be around 20mpbs (±4). Your 50 down connection couldn’t handle more than 2 streams. The lowest reported bitrate is 16mbps on their support page (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate). 50/16 = 3.125, with network overhead you’d be VERY lucky to get 3 streams going without stuttering.

It’s entirely possible that a family of 5 would run into issues if they’re all home and some want to watch videos.

My family of 4 have been Plex trained… So I mitigate a lot of these problems personally.

But it’s more likely that the 10 up breaks things even more. One person in the house uploading anything (or participating in zoom/teams/etc calls) will cripple your ability to make ANY request to the internet.