I'm sort of in a very rural area. Farm fields across the street from me. But I'm also ~5 minutes or so away from downtown.

I have available to me gigabit (down) from Comcast. I had it for awhile and it was glorious but it was also $80/mo on promo and $110 when not. The reason I got it was not for the download speeds, it was the faster upload speeds that came along with it. Still slow, and not even remotely close to speedy. But it was a solid 12mbit up. Compared to the 5mbit up I get on my 100down plan.

I would kill for some reliable upload speeds. It's awful anymore just sending images to people, never mind you want to send a quick minute long video to someone and it takes several minutes to send.

Any network engineers around? What leads comcast to offer such lopsided connectivity? I mean having some sort of asymmetry is normal and somewhat justified, but usually were talking something like 1:10 upstream:downstream. Here parent comment has fairly extreme 1:83 instead!? I imagine there must be some reasoning behind it, but I just can't figure what that would be.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but DOCSIS over coax isn't full duplex. It's multiplexing send and receive over the same wire. Since download bandwidth is more important they provision their network design to maximize the amount of downstream bandwidth available. They also have an extreme level of oversubscription.

My understanding is that it’s not a technical issue, but rather a business and marketing one. Comcast doesn’t want the home service to compete with their costlier Business service, so they artificially limit the upload speeds to prevent home/consumer users from serving a high volume of content using their less-expensive service.

The last mile DOCSIS bandwidth is shared among all of its user. So you want to maximise the download which is used 90% of the time. The problem is somewhat solved ( or lessen ) in DOCSIS 4.0 Full Duplex Extension. But as with everything DOCSIS the lead time to market is extremely long.

I believe, but am not a network engineer, that more channels of the system are dedicated to downstream and the standard prioritizes it.

Municipal Fiber is the way to make that happen. It allows ISPs to offer very cheap rates, since they do not have to provide the infrastructure. I live in a building connected to a municipal network, and pay $32 Canadian for symmetric gigabit.

I currently (temporarily) live in the boonies (3 hours north of SF in the woods) and Starlink can't be available soon enough.

I'm renting office space in town where the best I can get is a 40 Mb DSL line because I can't get anything other than HughesNet at the house. More than a few days of SSH over satellite will make you want to regret the day you decided programming would be a fun profession.

Forgetting about the latency for a moment, even though HughesNet advertises nice speeds, it's very much the same "speeds up to" crap most other ISP do. They're so oversubscribed that you can barely browse the internet in the evening most of the time.

Starlink works well (got it for my in-laws place in Placerville). It was a little rocky early on with more frequent dropouts, but now the dropouts are rare and the speeds are fast: 50mbps to 200mbps and this is with the dish being slightly obstructed by a tree.

In SF though I'm in a webpass wired building and have 1gbps up and down for ~$700/yr or ~$58/month.

On the Peninsula Comcast had 1gbps down and 35mbps up, but they also had a (very expensive) Comcast Gigabit Pro plan that was 2gbps down and 2gbps up with a second 1gbps down/up line included too and a fancy switch also. Hard to order though and the reps don't know about it. Cool that it's available though.

I never ended up getting it, but I wrote up some details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc...

You can't even get symmetric gbit in most of San Francisco :(

I am in rural part of Bellevue (Greater Seattle Area), and we have symmetric gbit from Ziply. Works like a charm, but lacks IPv6.

I'm sorry but there's no such thing as a rural part of Bellevue. Regardless of however not-dense your particular area is you're still close to a major population center.

shrug everything is relative.

About 50% of SF has above ground wiring and Sonic offers 1gig symmetrical in those neighborhoods at a reasonable cost.

hm, I have this but Sonic still doesn’t service me