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Comment by cyral | Hacker News Reader

I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved for uploads, since uploading is only needed for authenticating your subscription, pay-per-view purchases, etc. Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to re-allocate the upload bandwidth, because this splitting is implemented with actual hardware frequency filters that are buried and on poles all over the US.

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As far as I have heard, they could choose to use N out of M channels for either upload or download and they are choosing to keep it the way it is. Probably they need to keep it that way for other reasons (their own cable-TV signal goes through it). But I know nothing about the electronics/signal-processing involved, so I could be totally wrong.

Mostly to slow torrent seeders. A fat up pipe and no data limit means TB after TB go to seed torrents.

Otherwise for 90% of users, 90% of their traffic is download.

Me legit pushing a 2GB docker image gets hit in the crossfire,

Also so they can upsell business internet. I'm pretty sure most ISPs still have a clause in residential service agreements that you won't "operate a server" and everyone knows that the only reason you'd be uploading a lot is if you're running a server. /s

One might say that the state of the art has been chained up with awful upload speeds. Where you can think of one possible application, I can think of more, and undoubtedly there are even more that don't occur to people because it doesn't enter their experience. Being able to do practical off-site backups from home, even snapshots on an hourly basis? That'd be the dream. Oh wait, I'm doing that now because I have 1 gigabit/sec upstream at home!

It's also worth mentioning that Comcast is one of the largest "traditional" media corporations on Earth, and is therefore heavily motivated to act against media sharing (piracy).

Everything about their business outside internet service is built to be a vertical integration, so it's only natural to use their ISP business arm to support that.

The future and the present for some people is basically delivering everything over a singular pipe as packets just routed to different devices.

For comparison look at voice and data on cell phones once strictly different radios and now commonly handled as voice over LTE or VOLTE

Most of the TV channels are shit, so it makes no sense to reserve so many channels for them, especially as people are cutting TV service and switching to streaming.

That's why Switched Digital Video exists.

Yes, you have it exactly right. The cable infrastructure was built out in the era of "on demand TV", and the coax cable and frequencies they used required some hard choices. Hard in the sense of hardware. Perhaps quite sensibly for the time, they installed hardware filters that allocated most of the spectrum for download.

In Denmark I had 300Mbit/s coax/cable broadband. I think the upload was about 30Mbit/s.

It was then upgraded to 1000Mbit/s down, 250Mbit/s up, with no change to the cost, IIRC. A technician installed a frequency (?) splitter of some sort, one side for TV and the other Internet.

He remarked that my socket was nicely accessible, so I think he'd been doing this hundreds of times.

(I may have paid an engineer call-out fee for this, I can't really remember. It was 2 years ago.)

> a frequency (?) splitter

The term for the thing it does is "frequency division multiplexing"

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