to be honest I don’t know much about the basics of network technology … but I don’t really get why it is such a problem to get high upload speeds … couldn’t you simply make every connection roughly half the current speed but then symmetric and not asymmetric …? is it a technological problem or just as it is done today …?
It does fall down to design.
In the days cable and (A)DSL was being designed for consumer use the traffic profile of 99.99999% of consumers was all downloads and mostly URL and handshaking for uploads. bittorrent did not exist and only the rare file/email was uploaded, and even then the upload file size was very small by today’s standard.
Commercial grade connections were different
So the designers came up with ADSL and the basics of cable systems we use today. Only the latest version of cable systems allow greater than 2Mbits/sec upload. It enabled them to maximise the download speed and use a back channel with a frequency that could not handle the data rate achieved by the download channels. Cable for instance is using say 50 or more MHz channel for downloads (64QAM) and the 5Mbit/sec (TDM or similar) upload channel.
Simply they achieved greater downloads which is what every consumer (except a few) wanted when those designs were done. Great selling point. Also meant that ISPs could buy x GB/S links from the net and use x/10 GB/S links to their uplink providers/core routers
Its taken over a decade using these upload crippled technologies for the industry to begin to recognise that consumers also upload data apart from bittorrent. ISPs did not care that Bittorrent suffered, not one bit did they care.
Even when Conroy proposed AU fiber to the home the max speed was 100mbit/s down and 40mbit/sec up.
1 Like
oh - okay - they really have 2 physical channels with different data capacity 
i didn’t know that … but yes makes sense … by using it like this bandwidth utilization can be much higher …
that of course is very sad … i thought they might be able to use simply a fair split … but because of the one-way-transmissions nowadays the hardware probably wouldn’t support it even if you accepted the drawbacks of such a change in design :-\
thanks for the info! @neo
1 Like
And that big jump in speed from ADSL2+ and a 5:2 ratio instead of 15:1 would have been a huge improvement for me and probably quite satisfactory for the foreseeable future - but the intellectual pygmies on the other political side decided a more primitive system (that will end up being more expensive in the long run!) was a better idea when they got into government . .
1 Like