Why is upload speed capped on DSL/Cable?

Bodine

Member
Mar 28, 2005
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Usually you see DSL speeds at 768 down/128 up. I see "premium" or business accounts with higher upload speeds.

A friend aksed "why" and I realized I didn't know. Bandwidth seems like bandwidth. Is it b/c downloaded materiel is often cached, or what?
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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Have you ever used BitTorrent? If so, have you noticed that if you don't cap your upload speed and it maxes out your connection that your downloads suffer and latency jumps way up?
 

phisrow

Golden Member
Sep 6, 2004
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It probably doesn't hurt that downloaded material is, by nature, much easier to cache than the uploaded stuff. Also, price discrimination is a factor. Generic home users really don't need that much upstream bandwidth, web browsing, gaming, streaming media, and other such things don't take much upstream. Anyone who does need a nice upstream pipe is likely to be more willing to pay(business website admin) and/or more expensive to the company(pirate king bittorrent user). The ISPs thus want to make sure that such people either pay more.
 

spidey07

No Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
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general traffic patterns are - end user is bursty/sporadic traffic, one-2-one kind of conversations. Servers are somewhat constant and steady, one-2-many.

Its to discourage serving.
 

Zolty

Diamond Member
Feb 7, 2005
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Originally posted by: Com807877
I have heard it's because they don't want you to run servers on a personal account.

Servers are against most ISP's Terms of Service. Also if you arent hosting a server then there is nearly no point to having a huge upload. DSL will generally give you more upload than cable, in the case of ADSL it is generally the same as your download.
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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Also if you arent hosting a server then there is nearly no point to having a huge upload.

You need a decent amount of upstream to be able to ACK all of those downstream packets i.e. limiting upstream also limits downstream.

DSL will generally give you more upload than cable

Depends on your ISP, Comcast now gives me 384Kb up and 4Mb down. To get that with DSL in this area you have to get Tier 2 or Tier 3 service and the price is a good bit more.

in the case of ADSL it is generally the same as your download.

SDSL is the same up and down stream, the first S stands for symmetric.