Assuming that you are on a residential internet connection, your provider probably restricts your upload speed. This is by design, so that you are not running a server behind a residential internet connection rather than a commercial/business subscription. A resident is expected to be a consumer and not a content or service provider, so your download speeds will be faster than upload.
Edit 1: I believe it is also intended to dissuade people from illegal copyrighted filesharing, but I don’t think upload speed restrictions really has much of an impact in that regard.
Because a part of your bandwidth is allocated for download, and another for upload.
Since most of the average user’s internet activities is downloading things (reading articles, watching videos, what have you), the download portion is made wider at the expense of upload. That is especially true of asymmetric connections. That’s the A in ADSL.
While some connections will allocate an 80/20 split, very fast connections (like fiber) can support higher upload allocations since it’s not as detrimental to download.
Imagine that the Internet is delivered in trucks, and those trucks have one highway to your house. You might have 10 lanes on this highway total, but you can divide them as you please.
You might say, “ok, let’s make 5 lanes go to my house, and 5 lanes go to the Internet”. And then you start casually using the Internet, and notice that you have a lot of trucks coming in slowly, and not many going out. This is because, for the most part, people download a lot more stuff than they upload.
Now, while you could build more lanes coming to your house, that’s going to cost money. Instead, you could just rework it so you use some of those outbound lanes instead. You might split it so you have 8 lanes inbound and 2 lanes outbound. Now you have more capacity to come in, and you can still keep up with the outbound traffic quite easily.
Of course, occasionally you’re going to do something that saturates the 2 lanes, but most of the time they’re going to go at a nice enough pace, usually just sending stuff like your requests for specific inbound trucks.
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