so your local internet service provider promised you blazing fast internet and
while they've delivered in the sense that you have no issues streaming all
the 4k netflix you want you're still waiting around seemingly forever when
you have to upload a video or a photo so
why is it that upload and download speeds are often so different like you
know driving in the reverse direction during rush hour so it's like this
visualize the internet connection coming into your house as a pipe that's only so
wide in other words there's a limit to how much data it can carry at one time
your isp sections off the pipe to
accommodate different services for example if you have a dsl connection
part of the pipe will be reserved for phone service while another part is
dedicated to internet data and if you have cable or fiber that same pipe might
also be carrying a cable tv signal you can learn much more about that right up
here but the gist of it is that service providers pull this off by using
different frequencies for each type of data so that your apple music stream
doesn't conflict with your charlie brown christmas special that you're watching
on cable and because the pipe can only let so much data through at once your
provider has to make decisions about how
much of it to dedicate to each service and in the case of internet that section
of the pipe actually gets further divided into upstream and downstream
data but even though there's only so much space in the pipe
it's not like the providers out there are hurting for bandwidth for example
let's say that your internet signal comes over a plain old copper cable a
relatively new standard called docsis 3.1 which is a revision of the base
docsis standard that allows a broadband connection over old school cable tv
pipes supports up to 10 gigabits per second downstream and one
gigabit per second upstream by packing more data into each frequency so there's
clearly plenty of headroom in that old copper wire so why are the slow upload
speeds well when home internet first started
becoming widespread in the mid 1990s user generated content like the photos
and videos that we're constantly sharing on facebook or google drive or
bumble well they weren't really a thing and
you're probably mostly sitting there looking through geocities pages on
internet explorer 3.0 so at most you were maybe uploading small jpegs as
email attachments and the idea that we are downloading far more than we're
uploading has stuck around to this very day and that's actually still true to a
great extent you might watch plenty of 4k videos on amazon prime but how many
of you are uploading 4k video to social
media probably not nearly as many so while internet providers do allocate
more bandwidth to upload these days 10 or 20 megabits per second is pretty
common right now it's still quite a lot slower than the accompanying download
speeds which are increasingly pushing into the triple digit range sometimes
even on lower priced plans so when you've got multiple devices attempting
to upload data at the same time you can quickly saturate such an upstream
connection but that doesn't mean things will stay that way forever as customers
increasingly demand a fat upstream pipe for high-res video calls streaming their
video games and uploading files to cloud storage isps are taking notice and the
new docsis 4.0 standard supports 10 gigabits per second both up and down
also many fiber to the home connections offer symmetric connections already by
default where just as much of the pipe is dedicated to uploads as it is to
downloads it's also easier for the fiber providers to do this because light can
carry so much data over a distance than copper you can find out more about that
in this video so hopefully no matter where you're getting service you won't
have to wait too much longer for a better upstream connection than that kid
who's trying to climb up the down escalator at the mall
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you enter techwiki in the how did you hear about us section so thanks for
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