In Design Nine's planning study work, we began to notice that about three years ago, many ISPs, especially the cable Internet companies, no longer provided any information about upload speeds. They started doing this to help hide the fact that their upload and download speeds were highly asymmetric. This was a marketing ploy that worked fairly well when few people were trying to work from home and there were few distance learning students.
The Covid crisis everything, with huge numbers of people working from home or trying to take classes from home suddenly realized that SYMMETRIC bandwidth was actually important.
Most fiber networks, like the kind that WideOpen Networks designs and builds for our municipal and private sector clients, have symmetric upload and download speeds baked into the network design, and equal upload and download speeds are typically offered at no extra cost.
Now Comcast has come up with an interesting new approach to providing better upload speeds: They are going to let you pay extra for better upload speeds! Amazing! I'm sure that will make their customers very happy.