In addition to cable being the primary means of providing service in the US which does allow for this, there are two reasons for doing it. First, down is all that is advertised. Up is only mentioned in small print usually. And second, the major ISPs and the content companies have merged so it's an anti-"piracy" measure. It significantly impacts torrent seeding and hosting sites using residential Internet service.
How is this possible? Most of network hardware is symmetric. It doesn't make sense.
Cable Internet / DOCSIS splits bandwidth in a way that greatly prioritizes download over upload.
I mean network hardware between providers.
It's a last-mile thing. Artificially boosts the download numbers which most customers look at.
Doesn't DOCSIS 4.0 support 10gbps down and 6gbps up?
The biggest benefit of DOCSIS 4.0 is the ability to dynamically reallocate bandwidth between upload and download.
In addition to cable being the primary means of providing service in the US which does allow for this, there are two reasons for doing it. First, down is all that is advertised. Up is only mentioned in small print usually. And second, the major ISPs and the content companies have merged so it's an anti-"piracy" measure. It significantly impacts torrent seeding and hosting sites using residential Internet service.