YOU Needs More Upload Capacity

“YOU”, as you know, is the Time Magazine Person of the Year.  YOU has taken control of the Web and is providing much of its content. YOU and you (and I, too) need more bandwidth for uploading, emailing pictures and videos, and doing online backups.

In the early days of the Internet we sent relatively short emails and cursed anyone who clogged our dialup lines with 500K attachments. As the web developed, we sent brief text URLs or search requests up and got back relatively complex (for those primitive days) static web pages. It made sense then to build asymmetric access networks with at least two thirds of the available bandwidth devoted to downloaded traffic coming at you and a stingy remainder for sending data up and away.

Not any more.  YOU and you and I are uploading videos of the kids opening presents, emailing megabytes of pictures at a single click, and supplying almost as much content as we consume. Applications like web-based backup of your local drive result in much more information going up than goes down. Hopefully you don’t need to download the backup data very often.  More and more of my friends have webcams pumping data up from interesting (and boring) locations.

Internet access providers have been in the habit of featuring download speeds and not mentioning the upload speed at all or burying it in the mouseprint at the bottom of an ad.  For example, Verizon touts “up to” 768Kbps (kilobits per second) as the speed of its basic DSL service.  A search of their site using the keyword “upload” got no hits. The only place that I could find the actual upload speed, which is a puny 128Kbps, was in a CNET story about Verizon’s original service announcement (thanks, Google).   According to the same story, Verizon’s 1.5Mbps (megabits per second) service has an upload speed of 768Kbps and its 3Mbps service sends data up at 1.5Mbps.

On the other hand, Verizon is proud of the upload speed of it FiOS service even though the service is extremely asymmetric. The base service for residences has a download speed of 30Mbps (impressive) and upload of 5Mbps (adequate today for most home applications). The accompanying ad copy comparing this to cable offers says: “Wait patiently. [Cable] Upload speeds are usually not even close to the speeds offered by FiOS.”

Burlington Telecom, an interesting municipal utility which is running fiber to residences in Vermont’s largest city, offers only symmetric Internet access.  You can get residential speeds from 256Kbps to 5Mbps – always the same up or down.  Burlington Telecom understands what YOU needs and writes about it here.

The excellent radio-based Internet service I get in South Hero, Vermont from GlobalNet is 3Mbps in each direction.  On the other hand, satellite-based connectivity from WildBlue is badly asymmetric at a nominal 1 Mbps download and 200KBps for the connection I bought and hated.

Now that YOU and you and I are responsible for uploading content to the Internet, we’ve got to make sure we have the upload speed to do our job.  If you have a choice of broadband providers, be sure to check upload as well as download speed.

How Broad is Your Band is a tutorial on speed and bandwidth.