Why such low UPLOAD speeds

beeceedeecee

With companies offering 100 -200 and 300mb dl speeds , why then do the only offer a paltry max of 20mb UPLOAD , makes no sense ? .

ED E

Its the technology in use. Used to be about 16:1, newer tech is around 5:1. This is what the global market wants.

The only upload use case for the vast majority of users is syncing photos/offsite backup which only became a thing for most in the last 3yrs or so. The kit has been in development for 5yrs +.

beeceedeecee

how difficult is it for a provider to change it , and would it need to rolled out to all or done case to case so to speak ?

demanufactured

Symmetrical doenload/upload is very expensive and usually reserved for leased lines / enterprise networks.

BsBox

Building on what the others already mentioned, someone on Quora answered this exact question really well.

The reason for the trade-off is because there is only so much frequency available in the [wires]...
Higher frequencies suffer noise and signal loss sooner than lower frequencies, so there's an effective limit to how much spectral bandwidth is available. Since the available spectral bandwidth is limited, how it's used becomes an issue.
Since the design intent is for higher download speeds, more of the available frequency is assigned for download and less is assigned for uploads.

That's just one aspect of it though, and it's actually more complicated than that. At the risk of getting too technical, here's another bit

The connections all terminate next to each other at the provider end in closely packed equipment and in the cable runs to the equipment. At the subscriber end, the terminations are far apart (i.e. at different buildings). This causes more crosstalk at the provider's end of the connection. The signal originating from the provider is less susceptible to crosstalk than the weaker signal arriving at the provider from the subscriber. This phenomenon further impairs the subscriber's upload bandwidth.

Now that sounds fairly complicated, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. When people are downloading, the information is being sent from your provider to the houses. So it's all going from one central location, and then splits up as it go further until it reaches the right house. The central location can send the signals in a way that it knows they won't interfere with each other as they travel down the wires.
On the other hand, when you're uploading, you're sending your information back up through the wires from your tiny router, and it's being sent back along with everyone else's information. Cross talk becomes a bigger problem this way.

Fibre broadband (and I mean when every part is fibre, straight to your router) like SIRO don't suffer from slow upload speeds because in effect, they have a direct line to your ISP, and the issue of cross talk and bandwidth is much smaller.

demanufactured

Also ISP's don't want you hosting services such as Web servers etc.....they want you to pay a big price to be able to do so.

murphaph

We have ADSL2+ Annex J here. I'm glad we do as it offers that little bit of extra upload that enables quality Skyping. VDSL on the way by year's end I hear though.

BsBox

murphaph wrote: »

VDSL on the way by year's end I hear though.

Do you mean for your exchange or Ireland in general?
The cabinet down the road from us has had VDSL2 for 2-3 years now, and a guy from SIRO just knocked to say our house had been passed by their network so we were eligible for 1Gbps up/down.
Networks are slowly but surely being dragged into 2016.

ItHurtsWhenIP

BsBox wrote: »

Do you mean for your exchange or Ireland in general?
The cabinet down the road from us has had VDSL2 for 2-3 years now, and a guy from SIRO just knocked to say our house had been passed by their network so we were eligible for 1Gbps up/down.
Networks are slowly but surely being dragged into 2016.

He means where he lives in Germany.

BsBox

ItHurtsWhenIP wrote: »

He means where he lives in Germany.

*cogs in head turn slowly*
I am smart.