AT&T et al. fight against higher upload speeds in $20B FCC program

arstechnica.com

40 points·sarcasmatwork··4 comments

I never understood why all the big ISPs force people into such asymmetrical plans (factor of 10 where i live). The available bandwidth with a standard cable model is symmetric isnt it? If it were just a case of typical industry rent seeking there should be some kind of plan available with decent upload, but there is nothing for ordinary consumers. Is it a vertical integration/IP cartel issue?

reusing my old comment: ADSL2+ uses frequency division duplexing (FDD), ~9:1 ratio (50/448 bins). DOCSIS up to 3.1 is also FDD. Typical EuroDOCSIS 3.0 modem deployments work in 8/4 (max 400/100 Mbit) or 16/8 (max 800/200 Mbit) channel configurations.

Finally 'full duplex' DOCSIS 3.1, renamed to 4.0, promises up to 10Gbps symmetric transfers thanks to echo cancellation (V.34 dialup modem says hi). Of course we barely switched to 3.1 and its unlikely cable networks will jump on the 4.0 bandwagon any time soon.

Maybe at ISP scale you can cache a ton of content, so a good chunk of client's inbound payload does not requiring peering, while most of the uploads do.

With Netflix you can have edge appliances that have content caches, and you can have various accelerators from the big CDNs, but with TLS being mainstream you can’t just stick an http caching proxy on the wire.

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