I know that internet providers gives you a limited bandwidth for uploading and download and most of the times they divided with more download speed than upload. How does this division work? Is it a hardware thing , like the cable is specifically made for download/uploaded speed ? Is it possible to have a flexible division between these two, for example if I wanna download I have 90/10 division and if I wanna upload 10/90? (Excuse my English, it’s not my mother language).
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In short: Whatever medium is being used to transmit the connection is divided into multiple “channels”, like TV or radio channels. Each channel can transmit data in one direction at a certain speed. When you connect to your ISP’s network, your network hardware negotiates with the ISP’s hardware and they decide which channels are used for upload and which channels are download and reserve enough channels for your use so that the combined speed of the channels is the connection speed you pay for. Usually the upload channels are grouped together and the same for download channels, and the group for upload channels is smaller than the group reserved for download.
> Is it a hardware thing , like the cable is specifically made for download/uploaded speed ?
Depends on the medium. Fibre optic cables generally have a separate ‘up’ and ‘down’ cable, and they have the same capacity. So it makes sense that there’s no difference between the upload and download speed on offer, because using space on the upstream side doesn’t take anything away from the downstream side.
Copper cables (the like the coax historically used for cable TV) only have so much capacity, and it has to be split between upstream and downstream traffic. Very few people need all that much upstream traffic, so most of the capacity is allocated by the ISP for downstream to the customer.
Depends on the type of media, most of the dedicated stuff for internet, like fiber and ethernet, supports the full bandwidth in both directions simultaneously. So if you have fiber internet, you essentially get symmetric all the time in both directions, and any restrictions from that are purely policy.
Cable is different, generally, you get 125x 6MHz channels. Each channel supports communication in one direction (primarily because these are shared links). So they’ll do stuff like 100 channels for TV, 20 for download, and 5 for upload. The modem can spread upload and download over a few channels too.
My favorite ELI5 analogy is that it’s like interstate highways that have lots of lanes. Internet Service Providers manage these lanes. If there are 10 lanes total but you know that almost all traffic is going one way, then you will make 9 out of the 10 lanes go one direction and only 1 lane for the other.
The average consumer does way more downloading than uploading, so ISPs dedicate more of their hardware to optimizing the download lanes.
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It is a hardware thing, in part. But it’s also dependent on individual use case. With residential internet for example, in most cases download speeds will be much higher than upload speeds (download = data being transferred to you from elsewhere, upload = you transferring data elsewhere). This is because most residential internet users mostly request services from elsewhere and rarely are hosting services for others to use from their home.
Now onto the hardware bit. With residential fiber, there is typically a single medium in which data is being transferred, and being that data is being transferred via photons (as opposed to electrons with copper mediums) through a glass tube, attenuation (signal loss) is negligible, so download and upload speeds are congruent. Whereas with standard cable internet (copper cable), there are separate mediums for download and upload. With copper cabling, electrons being passed through the medium are much more likely to run into one another and cause friction, as well as electrons being effected by other nearby appliances producing an electromagnetic field, resulting in slower data transfer and higher signal loss.
Most ISP’s offer separate packages for business and residential, with business packages allotting higher upload speeds, since businesses are more likely to host services (upload data).
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