Upload being low is frustrating. In my area Comcast sells “gigabit” service that’s 1000Mbps/20Mbps which seems like it’s explicitly designed to hook less technically aware customers who know “gigabit” is good but not exactly how.

Thankfully there are alternative ISPs here that sell symmetrical gigabit, but that’s definitely not the case everywhere.

In my case Comcast is 800/20 or 1000/35, but they refuse to even advertise the upload rate so you don't know when you're signing up. There's a somewhat outdated, very hard to find page that lists these [1] but many tiers (including mine) don't seem to be shown.

[1] https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement

ISTR, and this was ~3+ years ago now, that Xfinity/Comcast is quite hard to even find out what the upload speed of the different offerings is. I even was chatting with their support and asking and they were cagey, like "why do you want to know?"

Currently, at least in my area, after you've purchased a plan (potentially with a term agreement), you can log onto the Xfinity website and see what your expected upload speed is. Mine says 800 / 20, although I think it's possible that the 800 is really 900 and they undersell download speeds to avoid customer complaints. I regularly max out a Gbit line in iperf tests to nearby servers.

I wonder what at upload speed will the acks be congested and prevent full download speeds from occurring.

Is that even possible with SACK?

> I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable

I wish this were true. I'm in Seattle and Xfinity will only sell me 5 Mbps up, even at 480 down, unless I pay out the ass for a symmetric gigabit connection I don't need. Very much looking forward to the FCC forcing at least 20.

Where do you live? It's possible to get gigabit service from a handful of different non Comcast ISPs in most of the city.

Comments said they don't want to pay more for gigabit (that they don't need) just to get reasonable upload speed.

I’m also in Seattle and get symmetric gigabit for $49.99 all in, I’d be surprised if they’re getting 480 from comcast for cheaper. I think my provider is only available for apartment buildings but there’s likely competition from other providers that at least offer symmetric speeds.

Unfortunately Comcast is the only option in my 14-unit condo, which AIUI is not unusual for this size of building in this area.

The worst part is that the much larger condo right next to us has Google Fiber :(

That's the worst, and usual require board approval to change, which you can't get.

Dang, assuming you can get the HOA to sign on you might be able to get in with GFiber Webpass or Atlas (I personally have Atlas) since they’re both microwave providers. There’s no fiber to lay so all they need to do is put a dish on top and integrate it into the distribution system.

I'd recommend looking into the 5G home internet services all the major cell carriers offer. They're all cheaper than I was paying Spectrum for their minimum tier. None are offered at my address unfortunately but being in Seattle I'd bet you could get one.

I had fiber installed this summer and until they finally sent a staff engineer out it was going down 2-5 times a day. I work from home so I had to tether to my phone for Teams meetings to make sure I'd stay connected. It was actually completely fine and I only get 2 bars of LTE at home.

According to someone I know that works at Comcast, they're working on rolling out symmetrical (or at least closer to symmetrical) speeds—even over coax—within the next few years. I'm able to get 2000/200, which is decent. Metronet just buried fiber in my front yard, though, so I'm looking forward to symmetrical fiber soonish (though Metronet has been building so fast I'm worried about growing pains).

They announced this a few weeks ago (https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/comcast-first-deploy...).

Already starting the rollout in Colorado.

Yes, there's actually a significant ongoing scandal over this because they're only rolling it out (in most cases) to people renting their expensive hardware, even if the modem you bought already has the necessary DOCSIS 3.1 support. It's so scummy.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comc...

I can understand it to an extent—easier to do an initial roll-out when you're able to more easily control the parameters—but it certainly isn't a good look.

What's more scummy (IMHO) is that it's actually cheaper for me to rent their modem—which includes unlimited data—than it is for me to pay the fee to remove the data cap.

This has changed very recently: https://cordcuttersnews.com/comcast-is-making-changes-to-its...

Unfortunately, though, there are currently only three customer-owned modems approved for higher upload speeds: the CODA and CODA 56 from Hitron and the CM2050V from Netgear. The first two are from a company noone has heard of, and the last one is $350 (!) and includes pointless phone support. None of the near hundred other DOCSIS 3.1 modems on the market are supported, for no apparent reason.

Starlink will not qualify - even in area with no congestion where you have to problem maintaining >200Mbps down your upload speed averages around 15Mbps

yep, my average is about 88 Mbps down and 7.4 Mbps up on Starlink. The frustrating thing is it fluctuates a lot. At one point I could get about 160/10.

It's a bummer, but considering that all I had before Starlink was 768down/128kup, this is a godsend. It will never be as good as an actual good wire-line connection, but whatever, that's not really it's point. Anybody who has cable or fiber, or even a fast tier of DSL should not really bother with Starlink.

Yep, agreed. I am extremely glad that starlink exists, and I'm willing to pay double for starlink that I would pay for a connection limited to 12 Mbps down

As far as I can tell you can't meet the 20Mbps upload requirement anywhere.

I'm in rural middle of nowhere in central Europe, at a latitude with very dense Starlink coverage and I'm almost certainly the only Starlink user in my hex - the speeds I'm getting are pretty much unaffected by network congestion.

Even in those ideal conditions upload is 10-15Mbps 95% of the time, even when download is closer to 300 than 200Mbps

Agreed. ISPs can allocate bandwidth on DSL/Coax trunks as they please so it should just be a configuration change to increase the upload percentage.

That's not really true. There's certainly knobs to turn, and almost certainly some available capacity to increase uploads, but coax and dsl are fundamentally asynchronous.

Coax has to manage the single (or few) headend transmitter vs many CPE transmitters, you get better multiplexing to the CPE than from the CPE; and while the newest equipment may be able to handle CPE uploads across most of the spectrum, older equipment had a narrower range of frequencies available to upload with. If there's spare frequencies and downstream capacity isn't using it, then yeah... if not, there's trade offs.

For DSL, everybody has a dedicated pair to the DSLAM/remote terminal whatever, but crosstalk between pairs impacts the signals and again, the DSLAM has more ability to mitigate that towards the CPE than the CPE can when sending upstream. Anyway, VDSL/VDSL2 are specified with asymetric up and down bandwidth, as was ADSL. Of course, DSL ISPs tend to cap sync rates based on profiles, rather than running the lines to their maximum capacity, so a lot of lines do have more upload capacity than is allowed to be used, and to the extent that's the case, it would just take a profile update to get more upload for many users.

Thanks for the detailed overview. I stand corrected. Posts like yours are why I love HN.

DOCSIS (the Coax protocol) is asymmetric. 10:1 for docsis 3.1 and 10:6 for 4.0

So cable at least will always be a bit asymmetric. A lot of fiber deployments (GPON) are also but the bandwidth limits are much higher so it does not really matter.

I guess I'm the outlier. I have 300 down / 15 up and never really notice an issue.

How often do you upload? I notice especially when trying to rsync or upload files to the cloud.

Not often and never in large doses - mostly just recorded images or videos to the cloud. I don't know the use cases people have for that outside of streaming large media.

You don’t notice because you have never had the capability to host content. With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon. You could stream video from your own device, you could share it, etc.

The lack of high quality, high bandwidth symmetric connections to the home (and ipv6) is a huge boon to the entrenched big tech companies.

> With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon.

I am not following this one. Why would upload bandwidth at home inhibit backing up your phone/data to a NAS at home? Or are you referring to remote restoration / access?

Wouldn't the NAS be using its download bandwidth to receive backups when your phone is remote? and your phone would be on the local network when you're at home?

Sorry, I meant sync services too. As in right now, people use Google or Apple to synchronize their photos/files/etc across devices and locations.

But it could be possible to do this with your own device at home with sufficient upload.

It might be too late though, since if sufficient people are used to the big tech companies doing it, it might not leave enough of a market to develop sell a device to do it (although I feel like it should be doable with software and existing NAS vendors like Synology).

I have 10mbps upload from Comcast. My GoPro footage takes ages to upload. This is just infuriating.

There have been times where I considered tethering to my phone for large uploads. If it's at the end of my billing cycle, and I have enough room under my cap, I actually do it.

If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all. About the only advantage for the average person would be "Your iCloud backup goes faster".

1gig/500meg would be a huge step forward. I'm currently on the highest most bestest plan that my ISP (Astound) offers. And it's 1.2gig down, 50 mbps up. That's not a typo, FIFTY up. I'm a techy and even I know I don't need 1.2gig down. My house is wired with CAT6 because I dragged it around, but my main switch is still gig. So... I can't even enjoy the increased download. The only reason I stepped to that highest plan was to get more upload than the 20mbps they previously offered.

> If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all.

Personally I'd trade my current speeds (800 / 20) for 100 / 100 in a heartbeat. There's just ... not that much I can do with more than 100 down. That's fast enough to stream a Blu-ray disc directly off of a web server. It's fast enough that package updates on Linux take longer to install than they do to download.

Can I theoretically use more? Sure, it's nice to be able to download files or update Steam games a little faster. But 20 Mbps up is killing me. Backing up a drive to cloud server can take hours or days.