A huge portion of people don't need a massive upstream. This sounds more expensive for basically no benefit (for most)

A lot of people need enough for at least a steady Zoom/FaceTime call, and that's only going to increase over time.

potentially multiple simultaneously if mom&dad have separate jobs with kids attending classes.

asymmetrical is as antiquated as dial-up. there's no reason for it in 2023.

You don't need more than 10 mb for that though. How often are people uploading 1+ GB? For me at least the answer is never.

Not many are using gigabit upstream, but Spectrum’s 300 megabit down plans in my area come with like 20 megabit up. I’d get noticeable stutter in calls if I browsed the web during one.

Thankfully synchronous gigabit fiber came this year.

If I take a video on my phone and sync it to the cloud that's easily more than that. And if that takes up the whole 10 Mbit, video calls get unusable.

The majority of people is not the qualifier here for this argument. It's what is actually a good definition for the term "broadband" in this time and age.

A good definition shouldn't apply to the majority of people?

> A good definition shouldn't apply to the majority of people?

If "good definition of minimum broadband speed", then "applies to the majority of people". The converse is not true. It is not the case that if "applies to the majority of people", then "good definition of minimum broadband speed."

1. Whether a speed applies to a majority of people is necessary but not sufficient.

2. You are unknowingly accepting being ripped off. It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.

Today's internet technology (particularly optical fiber [2], paired with hardware implementing DOCSIS 3.1 or 4 [3]) is fully capable of providing 1 gigabit symmetrical for "the majority of people", even in rural areas. Moreover, in the long term, transitioning to fiber would be less expensive to the big ISPs like Comcast [4], but Comcast keeps raising prices on broadband over decades-old copper wires and committing subsidy fraud [5]. Don't let big ISPs define "good enough" to be much lower than technology and the price of the technology allow.

Going by the Chattanooga metric, 100 mbps symmetrical should cost no more than $10, and anything lower is not a good definition of minimum broadband speed for the present (never mind the future).

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-super...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Versions

[3] https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/gig/

[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/why-slow-networks-real...

[5] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...

--------Everything below this line is bonus.--------

The following excerpt is from an article about data caps [6] but applies equally well to the state of broadband pricing in general.

> Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on an unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of scarcity — there is only so much bandwidth, and a few people are going to use it all. Yes, some network congestion arguments have prevailed with wireless broadband because of the atmospherical and technical limitations of the medium. However, congestion is not as consequential for fixed broadband. Broadband providers reason that instead of limiting these internet “super-users” (which would be discriminatory and litigated accordingly), they need to implement data caps for all consumers, which they claim is fair and unbiased. However, scarcity is not a reality for broadband providers, even with super-users. Internet functions by “statistical multiplexing” meaning that bandwidth is dynamically allocated and reused without a limit “[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas or oil.”

[6] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...

I'm not talking about costs, data caps, or anything else. I'm asking if a specified, asymmetric speed is really insufficient for most people. We don't need to define something that covers 99.9% of the population, we need minimums that are roughly sufficient for any given person. If a cable can only move a certain amount of data at a time, why not engineer for the direction the vast majority of it goes already?

>It is not the case that if "applies to the majority of people", then "good definition of minimum broadband speed."

I don't see why this wouldn't be the case. This isn't a physics problem with a right/wrong answer, it's a balance of the wants/needs of corporations vs. individuals. You're only talking about half of the equation to begin with, so forming logical statements on it is incomplete to begin with.

Let's pitch symmetrical, let them counter with 20Mbit up per 100Mbit down, and call it a victory.

i think you're about 1/5 the minimum speeds we should be countering. 100mbps up, 1000mbps down

I just noticed the document does prescribe 100 down, 20 up. Mb.

And yeah, I could go for a gigabit minimum.

Bs. Not sure why you think it but every system has cloud backup these days, folks regularly broadcast multiple video streams at once from home and a plethora of other activities that require upload.

Please stop spreading such misinformation as its an unnecessary expense. It costs zero dollars for upload stop cucking it because you don't understand its use.

And throw in an availability requirement so my gigabit connection doesn't drop to 10kbps every Friday night when everyone is using the internet.

Add in some moderate packet loss and you’ve got CenturyLink fiber.

My upload speed is a mere 35th of my download. Affordable symmetrical needs to be a thing. Especially with a certain ISP monopoly.

That's what gets me. Is there a technical reason why symmetrical connections would be more expensive than asymm?

The technical reason is that by restricting upload speed they can offer a higher download speed, and that is what most users care about.

I find that reasoning suspicious. Ever notice how most of the muni and coop internet providers offer a symmetrical speed while att and comcast don't? My bet is that there's no real technical limitation, it's simply price segmentation.

Fiber is symmetric, coax is not. This isn't some grand conspiracy, just how the underlying engineering works.

In the UK, Openreach FTTP is heavily asymmetric. Network operators aren't entirely at the whims of asymmetric standards: network operators want asymmetric services.

There is a technical limitation on cable and DSL networks but not on other techs like fiber or wireless.

AT&T does offer symmetrical speeds. Most PON-based FTTH ISPs I've encountered do.

There are technical reasons for offering asymmetrical speeds when it comes to coax connections. There's only so many channels on the wire, a lot are still dedicated to television, people mostly only care about download, so they prioritize it. PONs don't carry television and are just fundamentally different in design, so its easier for them to support symmetrical bandwidth.

This is nonsense. Fiber cables are always capable of the same speed in both directions at once. The actual reason is so they can sell you an overpriced "business" plan if you need upload speeds from the current decade.

A very small part of the country is connected by fiber, and fiber connections are always symmetrical. The vast majority of consumers still get internet via coax cables, and bandwidth is very much an issue on those.

No, a very small part of the last mile is connected by fiber. Trunking is always fiber these days. As are local neighbourhood branch points, if your provider evolved from a telephone company. (If you live in an apartment building served by an ex-telephone ISP, you likely have fiber run all the way to the network closet of your building, with only the per-subscriber in-wall wiring switching over to copper.)

ISPs that evolved from cable companies might still be using cable hubs with a common collision domain, but only a relatively small number of subscribers will be riding the same copper — it’s just cheaper these days to convert the signal to fiber as early in the signal path as possible. Plastic wires are cheaper than metal wires, and you need fewer of them (and so fewer switches.)

Yes, *fiber* can. But the majority of Americans use Cable/HFC (DOCSIS) technologies. These were designed as a one-to-many closed loop TV broadcast on a coax line. Except with the incoming DOCSIS 4.0 deployments it's always been asymmetric as a limitation of the technology

Fiber is not ubiquitous. Many of us are still on DOCSIS over copper, in which case the person you are replying to is exactly correct: upload speed can be reduced for additional download speed.

True FTTH is naturally symmetric; PON is not nor is Cable.

No, I think you might be confused. We all know that the fiber for the download link is at least 10x wider than the fiber for the upload channel. There's just no way to squeeze the same number of bits through the smaller "tube" /s

Though the fiber system as a whole may not be capable of symmetry. For example GPON with 2.5gbps/1.25gbps up/down and 10G-PON at 10/2.5 up/down.

Assuming we are talking about Cable internet: If they were starting from scratch all possibilities are equally expensive, but they have installed equipment in your neighborhood which assumes a specific channel allocation.

They have increased the channel allocation for upstream in recent years and DOCSIS 4.0 allows symmetric connections, but the demand is for downstream, and the fewer channels they allocate to upstream the bigger number they can advertise.

AFAIK, PON (Passive Optical Network) has inherent reasons to be asymetric

Not really. I'm sure asymmetric PON is cheaper but there are plenty of symmetric EPON modes.

My assumption is torrents are a threat to streaming services already and potentially a death blow if uplink speeds are too fast.

When I worked at a small ISP, this was indeed a threat. We offered symmetric speeds though and dealt with it via traffic shaping.

It really was just the odd teenager torrenting here and there.

why would uplink speeds being fast contribute to torrents outside of the first few seeders?... you would just have more peers contributing smaller amounts

Also new media (streamers and tubers) rely on uploads and are eating cable’s lunch. It’s just extortion through monopoly.

It depends on the layer 1 medium. In a shared RF environment (dialup, cable, wifi, p2p RF) you normally have a shared bandwidth space. This is typically "channelized" and you can pick how many channels you want for "up" and how many for "down". This isn't normally dynamic, it needs to be fixed by the standard or at the very least by the head end equipment. It's more expensive in the above RF spaces because cabling is expensive the more home runs you want to do. With fiber it's a little easier, 1:32 pon splits still give a _lot_ of bandwidth for upstream because it's easier to isolate the adjacent wavelengths (you can pack them in tighter), and the normal noise floor is lower. With 1:1 fiber DIA it's a total non issue and you can do what ever is the limit of the noise of the fiber and the limits of the transceivers (typically optical packages in sfp/sfp+ packaging these days)

Asymmetric speeds let ISP's oversell their network (more).

I don't care if it's symmetrical. I care that I have enough upstream.

I'd obviously rather have a useful 500/200 than a 100/100 or 50/50, even though the latter is symmetrical. (I think my service now is around 400/20. I'm way happier with that than I would be with 50/50.)