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Comment by naveen99 | Hacker News Reader

I am pessimistic about this coming upload utopia. Here in Houston suburb of Sienna, entouch (now grande) cut fiber upload speeds from gigabit to 30mb for reasons. Makes me suspect the cable modem asymmetry is also bs, (more about price discrimination and less about technology).

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I wonder how much of it revolves around the fact that fat upload pipes probably mainly matter when you are serving out content, and at that point probably the ISP would prefer you had a business account?

I have 50/50 symmetrical, so I guess I can't complain. Nowhere close to gigabit, but always more than enough for my needs.

It’s price discrimination turtles all the way down. At the edge, Business download speeds are even more expensive than consumer upload speeds.

Cable plants are generally weak on upstream bandwidth. Around here, there's only 4x 6mhz channels allocated for upstream, meaning about 100 megabits is shared across an entire node, which is 100's of homes. Downstream, on the other hand, is 32+ channels, plus a DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM channel, providing over a gigabit of bandwidth (shared.)

DOCSIS 3.1 was supposed to also improve the upstream situation, but OFDM upstream is no where to be found yet, as supposedly they have to upgrade all the amplifiers to support more bandwidth in that direction. Most people don't care. They're not uploading tons of files.

I'm hoping to get fiber someday.

Why can’t they just allocate more channels to upload. charge more, allocate more. But no, you can’t pay them to give you more upload.

They can do it but it requires physical upgrades, swapping out every amplifier in a node, for example. It’s a slow process. Some cable systems have gone to 8 upstream channels. I don’t know of anyone who has a 3.1 OFDM upstream. Does anyone here have that?

Conventionally asymmetry has actually made technical sense to increase download speed.

I must say I’m rather surprised ISP used to just give people symmetrical lines for free.

No it's about technology, spectrum usage on the wire to be precise.

Circular reasoning. How is that spectrum allocated ?

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