I hate asymmetric connections. You get gigabit download but something stupid like 20-100 Mbps upload? Just why... Upload speed matters just as much as download these days.
Because you have a single copper pair/coax cable with a finite bandwidth on it, and making a choice about how to split it.
Eg, your tech and cable can support 40 Mbps. If you split that 20/20, your users will have trouble watching 4K video that wants 25 Mbps. Change that to 35/5, and for most people it'll actually work better.
This issue goes away eventually as you either get a fiber for each direction, or you can just push terabits through fiber anyway, so there's plenty capacity to be symmetric without any compromises.
Oh yeah, missed the "cable" part. But I've seen the same thing with fiber in the UK and Germany. So the ISPs upgraded to fiber but kept the old (very) asymmetric speeds... I mean, at least have it be something more reasonable like 1000/500 :)
But I'm spoiled, growing up the only ISP in town spoonfed everyone higher and higher speeds even though no one asked for it. They're laying fiber to villages seemingly just 'cause. People are choosing 4G over fiber because it's cheaper (even though data is limited), go figure.
Well, actually there was a bit of government initiative (with no funding or enforcement) to boost the IT sector. The US would benefit much more heh.
Well, that exceeds my knowledge, but my guess is that it'd be very tricky to accomplish.
You have one cable, a given frequency may go in one direction or in another. Both sides have to agree on what it's being used for. You'd need a communication channel between the ISP side and the client side to constantly negotiate, and that negotiation would take some time, so such a mechanism would have some latency to it, with possibly weird effects on things like online games. You could get weird behaviors where some particular pattern of traffic would result in the connection readjusting itself just wrong on a regular basis and result in hordes of angry gamers.
I think it's reasonable to guess that ISPs targeting consumers have no interest in monitoring and troubleshooting such a thing when they can just set a fixed split and be done with it (and ask the customer to upgrade to a bigger plan if it's not good enough), and ISPs targeting enterprises have no need for it.
Edit: And there's the issue of how you sell such a thing. It's a system that readjusts itself automatically based on some arcane magic and may work differently from one day to another. How do you make any reliable promises about it?
What really sucks is the ratios these cable companies go with, 1000/50 is a 20/1 ratio. Having something like 500/100 would be light-years better for the vast majority of people even though you would be sacrificing overall bandwidth.
Perhaps it's a conspiracy to have less tech-savvy work-from-homer's keep bumping up their speed plan because their upload speed isn't up to snuff for video meetings. Either that or cable companies feel they need to compete on advertised download speeds with fiber, which is a losing battle.
