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 1 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 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. So thanks for watching guys. Like, dislike, leave a comment. If you have a suggestion
for a future Fast as Possible, don't forget to check out one of our other videos. We make lots
and lots of videos around here. I promise at least some of them are good.