why should internet’s upload and download speed be different? Isn’t it the same connection?
In: Technology
You got a road. There is enough room for a total of 4 lanes. You know that there is WAY more traffic going north than going south. So as a smart road designer, you decide to put 3 lanes going north and 1 lane going south. That way you keep traffic fluid most of the time.
The road is the cable, the lanes is the bandwith, north is download and south is upload.
The total bandwith on a certain cable is limited, so the smart move is to put more of it on what is more often used: Download.
The main technological reason is that while the communication is technologically the same, usually data is being sent over multiple channels at the same time, and those channels aren’t bidirectional.
Specifically with cable internet a cable modem will communicate over multiple channels (frequencies) at the same time, and each channel only communicates one way. Each channel needs some setup time to start communicating and the actual electronics used for sending and receiving are different. You can see this when you buy a cable modem the number of channels it can support might be listed as 8×4 meaning the hardware can support a max of 8 downstream and 4 upstream channels.
This gets split unevenly like this because most people will download much more than upload.
Connections that are fully bidirectional, like fiber or ethernet don’t have this problem, but there can be bottlenecks further up the stream that cause differences in upload and download.
It’s simply far more useful to dedicate more bandwidth for download than upload. It’s the vast majority of traffic, so dedicating anything but a small portion to upload doesn’t make sense.
Some isp’s with excess bandwidth can afford to have more generous upload allocations, but it’s not the most cost efficient use of their pipelines.
Some isp do offer the same speeds for both. Some however, provide way lower upload speeds to limit the bandwidth of the user.
Yes it is but the reason is because the ISP doesnt want people running servers off a home connection so they limit the upload. If you want to run a server, they want to charge more.
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