Balancing, customer needs, limitation of hardware/infrastructure. Copper doesn’t handle symmetrical download and upload as well (this is where fiber comes in). There can be too much noise resulting in degraded consistency. Its prone to interference and leaks. To improve reliability, you get asymmetrical plans. Most people just want download. Which has historically been the cheaper choice. An example local to my area, a home plan will be 800 down and 20 up. A business plan will be 500 down and 300 up. The business plan costs more.
Yeah, but nowadays with self hosting, cloud synced apps, peer to peer game matchmaking, and working from home… Cable is practically useless, yet still the only option in some places.
I switched to 5G. Get the same download and was more upload for less money. Latency is a little lame sometimes. It’s not terrific for online gaming. But it’s better for everything else.
I love my UnRaid server and my local smart home and my PiHole and everything. But I’m one of two in my extended family and one of <10 in my extended friend group that even knows what the words you said mean. Most people don’t care about those things. (or at least don’t care / know enough to set them up)
Most people know 5G is bigger than 4G. Or 7>6 for WiFi. Unless they’re streaming upload speed tends not to register.
Working from home is certainly not super-niche not for the past 4 years or so. Most of my WFH users that complain all the time are on cable ISPs. Reason being is because it’s easy to saturate upload, between system backups and people trying to put large files on shares and whatnot. And when upload is fully saturated, that can negatively impact download – especially when the VPN platform or users Internet connection doesn’t support IPsec or DTLS (see one of my other comments in this page for technical reasoning).
Not to mention, if they’re using a cable wifi gateway, the ISP can traffic shape them. I had the Comcast xfinity tower thing when I first switched, all my devices topped out at 10Mbps upload even if it was the only thing connected at the time. Swapped it for a surfboard and my own x86 router using openwrt and topped out at the max (at the time) 40 Mbps.
Because most people don’t need it. They can, and do, totally offer better upload speeds; but you’ll be paying out the ass for it because businesses have a much bigger demand for upload speeds, so you’ll be paying business prices.
Almost all of our performance issues for work from home users at my office, are on cable ISPs and directly related to limited upload speed.
For our users, that’s usually because of system incremental backups (and users creating large files, or files that don’t incrementally backup up very well and need to be fully replaced), and poor video call performance.
You see, a lot of web applications (and even our old VPN itself) uses TCP for communication. This means that every so many packets (which could be as little as 64kb of data), the server needs you to acknowledge that you had received the data before it sends more. If your upload is congested, those acknowledgements get queued behind all the other packets in line. This, in turn, ends up impacting download performance.
A lot of times it gets exacerbated by a partner/child coming home and instantly uploading a full days worth of videos and photos to iCloud/Google as soon as they get on the wifi.
Back in the 90s this was true. Internet at home was largely a one-way street. Nowadays with work from home, cloud-syncing apps, self-hosting, and peer-to-peer matchmaking games, among other things…the 6Mbps upload max that most cable ISPs offer is ridiculouslu limiting.
Lol, all of Spectrum’s plans (outside gig) say “Typical Upload: 10Mbs or higher”
Why is it so hard for ISPs to provide a higher upload speed
Sonic internet provides 10Gb up and down. I have no idea how they do it, but I love them.
Balancing, customer needs, limitation of hardware/infrastructure. Copper doesn’t handle symmetrical download and upload as well (this is where fiber comes in). There can be too much noise resulting in degraded consistency. Its prone to interference and leaks. To improve reliability, you get asymmetrical plans. Most people just want download. Which has historically been the cheaper choice. An example local to my area, a home plan will be 800 down and 20 up. A business plan will be 500 down and 300 up. The business plan costs more.
Yeah, but nowadays with self hosting, cloud synced apps, peer to peer game matchmaking, and working from home… Cable is practically useless, yet still the only option in some places.
I switched to 5G. Get the same download and was more upload for less money. Latency is a little lame sometimes. It’s not terrific for online gaming. But it’s better for everything else.
Which is super niche.
I love my UnRaid server and my local smart home and my PiHole and everything. But I’m one of two in my extended family and one of <10 in my extended friend group that even knows what the words you said mean. Most people don’t care about those things. (or at least don’t care / know enough to set them up)
Most people know 5G is bigger than 4G. Or 7>6 for WiFi. Unless they’re streaming upload speed tends not to register.
Working from home is certainly not super-niche not for the past 4 years or so. Most of my WFH users that complain all the time are on cable ISPs. Reason being is because it’s easy to saturate upload, between system backups and people trying to put large files on shares and whatnot. And when upload is fully saturated, that can negatively impact download – especially when the VPN platform or users Internet connection doesn’t support IPsec or DTLS (see one of my other comments in this page for technical reasoning).
Not to mention, if they’re using a cable wifi gateway, the ISP can traffic shape them. I had the Comcast xfinity tower thing when I first switched, all my devices topped out at 10Mbps upload even if it was the only thing connected at the time. Swapped it for a surfboard and my own x86 router using openwrt and topped out at the max (at the time) 40 Mbps.
Yeah I get 370 mbps down but only 10 mbps up why can’t I at least have around 50 up? Is it really that hard or just capitalism? lol
Mines about the same so I assume it’s intentionally being throttled.
imho they’ve always shittily capped uploads primarily cause they dont want you hosting servers which could eat up tons of bandwidth.
and again, i want to reiterate, this is IMHO, not something i am saying is a fact.
Because most people don’t need it. They can, and do, totally offer better upload speeds; but you’ll be paying out the ass for it because businesses have a much bigger demand for upload speeds, so you’ll be paying business prices.
I very much disagree.
Almost all of our performance issues for work from home users at my office, are on cable ISPs and directly related to limited upload speed.
For our users, that’s usually because of system incremental backups (and users creating large files, or files that don’t incrementally backup up very well and need to be fully replaced), and poor video call performance.
You see, a lot of web applications (and even our old VPN itself) uses TCP for communication. This means that every so many packets (which could be as little as 64kb of data), the server needs you to acknowledge that you had received the data before it sends more. If your upload is congested, those acknowledgements get queued behind all the other packets in line. This, in turn, ends up impacting download performance.
A lot of times it gets exacerbated by a partner/child coming home and instantly uploading a full days worth of videos and photos to iCloud/Google as soon as they get on the wifi.
Back in the 90s this was true. Internet at home was largely a one-way street. Nowadays with work from home, cloud-syncing apps, self-hosting, and peer-to-peer matchmaking games, among other things…the 6Mbps upload max that most cable ISPs offer is ridiculouslu limiting.