why should internet’s upload and download speed be different? Isn’t it the same connection?
In: Technology
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.
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