We really need some upstream minimums as well. That causes so much lag for me. Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down. I have a 200/10 plan now and it's difficult to do work with the maybe 5 that I get in practice if I'm lucky, especially after overhead from VPN.
Most broadband access in the US is via coax. And the coax companies refuse to let cable TV, and the packages they can bundle, die. So the portion of the coax that would allow for symmetrical service instead brings all the channels you didn't buy because everyone streams now.
Right now in a lot of states Verizon has a monopoly on symmetrical internet service. I can’t ever switch ISPs because I can’t get 400/400 anywhere else.
God I wish we had that here. We are pretty much stuck with Comcast as the only option in many places since they were granted a monopoly for so long and the phone company never really expanded much. DSL is too slow in most places. Like I think I can only get 100/1 where I am now, but the last place I was at which was not exactly rural at all, was max 12m/768k. In my current place I do have one other option which is another cable provider. They offer the exact same as Comcast for slightly less money, but the primary reason I use them is because they don't have a monthly data cap. With my wife and I working from home plus our personal streaming, we would exceed the cap and have to pay a significant amount to increase it.
Yeah ISPs are doing rural America really dirty. I didn’t even know monthly data caps existed with home internet until somebody from a rural town mentioned it. The only internet with monthly data caps around here is cell service and even then that’s usually unlimited now.
I do a lot of download and upload and one month I realized I accidentally moved like 30 TB that month.
Yeah I mean right now I'm in a relatively major city in the US (like 750K population), and the previous place I was just inside a major suburb (like 150K population). Rural is just plain screwed.
I have a home server which is used for quite a bit. Bunch of web apps including storage so downloading stuff to my phone over the internet means upload from my server, also multimedia too (That I actually pay for) via Plex, music, and podcasts. Photo hosting, sharing, and backups.
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.