"Comcast era" is not accurate, nor is the limitation "made up". ADSL service in fact has been the best option for a lot of us in Vermont and other rural areas, and while DSL can be symmetric as a technology it gets hard in spread out deployments to keep up signal. There are real tradeoffs to make when total bandwidth (in the signal sense) is pretty limited, trying to get pushed over old copper.

Going forward yes, it'd be nice to see symmetric speeds get emphasized more and hopefully made standard for any future targets. Widely deployed decent symmetric links would open up a lot of new options for decentralization, though it's probably worth being mindful of the negative effect it could have in terms of botnets if some thought isn't put into it. And a mere THREE down is definitely pretty absurd at this point, some friends on 25 Mbps ADSL still get 10 Mbps up and an office that is close enough to the provider to get 50 Mbps down is at ~24 up. But having some asymmetry at all doesn't seem inherently unfair yet? Between wisps/starlink/fiber maybe symmetric can be the goal next definition update.

We're currently fighting to get this definition changed to 100/100 symmetrical, because as you say this magic number of 25/3 lets DSL in the door, which in turn means incumbent providers can continue to get federal dollars that they will refuse to spend on infrastructure. Telcos will claim their ancient 50 year old copper is capable of delivering 25/3 to an area, when in fact only the first 5 houses on a road get near that number. If you happen to be the 12th house down the road (about a mile out) you get 7/1 on a good day because the copper was strung in the late 1950s. The minimum standard having a symmetric speed requirement prevents small diameter copper from stealing money from the pot.

>We're currently fighting to get this definition changed to 100/100 symmetrical

TIL I don't have high speed internet.

I don’t think anyone except fiber providers are offering more than 10 mbps upload.

Because piracy is an existential problem for Comcast (owner of NBCUniversial among others) there’s incentive to keep upload SLOW.

And don’t get me started on bandwidth caps. I remember doing the math and realizing I could hit my bandwidth cap in 8 minutes if my internet went the full theoretical speed.

Who is “we” and how can I help?

Doesn't it have to do with DOCSIS channels, i.e. that they reserve most of the channels for downstream and only a couple for upstream?

Cart before horse.