Hi everyone,
Not too experienced in networking and I have seen a lot of talk about this lately.
As a consumer, doesn’t only the download speed only really matter? Unless you are uploading videos to YouTube or something?
In: Technology
In the past few years especially, many home users have seen a risen need for sharing real time video, such as teleconferencing/work from home situations and the adoption of using WiFi networks to place cell phone calls.
These kinds of situations may require a notable amount of upload bandwidth.
As a consumer generally download bandwidth matters more, so ISPs manipulated Cable Modem and DSL technologies to maximize download bandwidth.
10 years ago upload bandwidth was also being throttled to a degree to limit file sharing technologies like BitTorrent.
In the past few years there’s been a rise in video conferencing, cloud syncing data, and other processes that require more upload bandwidth.
Let alone more niche things like Youtube uploaders and Streamers, so the demand for upload bandwidth has been increasing.
Upload bandwidth matters for:
* Zoom / FaceTime / other videoconferencing
* Twitch streaming
* Backing up local files to the cloud
* Content creation / posting hi-res videos to the cloud
* Cloud video cameras, like Nest, Ring, Arlo
Australia doesn’t seem to think so I am on 75mbps down, 10mbps upload and that is absolute maximum speed I can get. Seriously been eyeing up starlink
The other posts here are more accurate from a general ELI5 perspective, but here’s a little more from the nuts and bolts side of things.
So, much (most) of the network traffic on the Internet uses a protocol called TCP. TCP has a built-in mechanism to check if a data packet makes it to where it needs to go, or if we need to resend it.
It’s kinda like read receipts on a text message. Your phone sends my phone a read receipt notification when you’ve received and read the message I sent you.
Now for the kicker: if these “read receipts” don’t make it back to the sender, the sender is going to try to resend that message. This will delay any new messages from being sent, until the sender gets a “read receipt” or the sender waits for too long.
Without sufficient upload bandwidth and with enough usage on your Internet connection, there’s a small risk of those “read receipt”/acknowledgement messages being delayed or dropped. Which would slow down how fast you can receive data while downloading or streaming something.
99.9% of the time, this won’t be a problem, because these “read receipts” are very, very, very small compared to other types of network traffic.
Depends on your usage.
Things it would be useful for:
Multiple security cameras with cloud storage.
Livestreaming your video games.
Uploading videos to youtube.
Remote file storage/offsite backups.
Hosting files for other people to download.
When downloading, you use some upload too, for requests and acknowledgment. This means that when the upload is maxed out, download performance suffers too, along with all kinds of latency sensitive uses that don’t use much bandwidth.
Also keep in mind that the capacity may be split between multiple customers.
Personally, I would pay a bit extra for more upload speed, up to around 100Mbit/s. I don’t think I’d pay much extra to go from 100Mbit/s to 1Gb/s upload.
If your upload bandwidth is fully occupied, it affects the confirmation for the download of data which slows down download. Source: was on a 25/2 DSL line that worked great, until someone started backing up their files to the cloud, then everything stopped working.
Also a a consumer you want a decently high speed download and upload (like 100 Mbps down and 25Mbps up is one of the proposed FCC minimum standards it would support 4 4k down streams and 1 4k upstream) but another key component is latency. If you are on older stallite data connections, the latency is 1 second or so. It makes teleconferencing tedious. 40ms latency is like an entire frame in classic cinema. Getting down to singe digit ms latency is ideal, but it’s geographically determined.
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