I totally agree that the limited upload sucks. I was really looking forward getting to the point of being able to send/recieve wave files and monkey's audio (lossless)instead of crappy mp3 files, which eat up processor, as well as viewing web pages with photo-quality bitmap images instead of washy, color-faded jpeg images. Right now, my pentium 133 could display and play the same things I do with my 1.2 gig athalon. But because the big businesses won't invest in bandwidth, we're spending money on so-called faster processors to compress and decompress - which slows our view of the internet as a whole.
As far as the reasons, I have asked several ISP services why the upload speed on their high speed connection is lower than the download speed. I usually get all sorts of funny excuses, the most common one being ask someone else. I've heard things like "the FCC won't let us" although I have never been able to get a FCC rule or other fact out of them. Some of the better techs tell me that it is too hard to transmit upstream on a cable system, without causing harmonic interference to other cable viewers on the line. This is about the only good one I have got out of someone, which is technically feasable. I see no reason why it cannot be overcome, but it is a reasonable excuse.
But then, what about DSL? Up to August of 2000, I was in the process of moving to Quebec, Quebec (City), Canada. One of my many reasons for this was the fact that they were much more technologically advanced, with regard to mass communication, especially the internet.
Bell Canada was offering a DSL-like system, which basically blew away any connection I had ever used short of a public university server. The system uses the long-unused yellow and black wires of the existing telephone system for the internet, and the red and green for the phone. A nortel modem conects to the phone jack just like a standard phone would, and you have.... yes
1Megabit UPLOAD and DOWNLOAD!!!!!. I first thought that something was being mistranslated from french, but the customer service person was japanese and spoke perfect english. The demo was a quick download on what was napster, 4 files simultaneously, in about 15 seconds, coming from Montreal. We then tried connecting to a site and uploading some files. Same great speed. The service rep then told me that they would be upgrading the system at the end of the year, and that it would be running at 4 Megabits Upload/Download.
And all for $29.95/month, plus $10 for the modem rental (ok, that's $39.95!) Canadian dollars!
I then asked how much it was for the total, with telephone. He informed me that local phone service was included with the service. I explained to him how crappy our computer connections were, and that there was this strange problem with upload always being less than download in the US.
So, for all of you who think that two wire copper cannot send high-speed data, you are just plain wrong. It is our money-hungry telephone giants, who have tried to do everything but upgrade their vastly obsolete telephone networks...much less replace them with high speed internet. In many places in the US, we are using wires for phone that are many times 40 years old, corrodded, brittle, and othewise unreliable. Then, mix every possible different type of digital and analogue technology together, and make them all talk. What a big mess. Phone companies need to let competition in to take over, or get going on new networks. After all, high speed internet is the death of their business. (I have already disconnected my phone, don't use it enough to substantiate the bill)
Broadband will survive, as the internet is a permanent part of world communication. Excite at home can go - apparently it wasn't so exciting!
The upload/download speed issue shows three major things:
1. You can only download as fast as you can upload. This should be a basic principle of logic, but what they want you do is to download from non-"home" run sites, such as excite, aol, yahoo, e-bay etc., all which generate money, and pay big bucks to run big servers. ISPs are taking the cheap way around this, as they are doing everything possible to avoid putting expensive servers up. If the everybody had the ability to run their own site, advertising monopolies like clearchannel, gannett, hearst-argyle and fox would go out of business.
2. The internet, which started out as just that, has become the direct-connect net. For example, when using telephones, to do a conference/multi-party call, your phone is connected to a swithcher, which is connected, initially to another phone. When another person joins, they connect at the nearest switch which is part of the connection, not your phone directly. That was the way the internet was originally supposed to work. Now, the big companies such as AT+T, and public universities, are stuck with all of the interconnect traffic. Therefore, if you serve or upload, all the people connecting are directed to your modem. Thus, it is no different than a dumb telephone connection, which does basically the same thing, except that instead of breaking off somewhere down the line, 3 lines are all running to you, which wastes lots of bandwidth.
3. Consumers rate or view the actual speed of a service by its upload speed, not its download speed. Everybody that is waiting out the technology will continue to wait, until the ISPs are confident, and have matched upload and download speeds. This shows their systems stability, reliability, and consistency.
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I totally agree that the limited upload sucks. I was really looking forward getting to the point of being able to send/recieve wave files and monkey's audio (lossless)instead of crappy mp3 files, which eat up processor, as well as viewing web pages with photo-quality bitmap images instead of washy, color-faded jpeg images. Right now, my pentium 133 could display and play the same things I do with my 1.2 gig athalon. But because the big businesses won't invest in bandwidth, we're spending money on so-called faster processors to compress and decompress - which slows our view of the internet as a whole.
As far as the reasons, I have asked several ISP services why the upload speed on their high speed connection is lower than the download speed. I usually get all sorts of funny excuses, the most common one being ask someone else. I've heard things like "the FCC won't let us" although I have never been able to get a FCC rule or other fact out of them. Some of the better techs tell me that it is too hard to transmit upstream on a cable system, without causing harmonic interference to other cable viewers on the line. This is about the only good one I have got out of someone, which is technically feasable. I see no reason why it cannot be overcome, but it is a reasonable excuse.
But then, what about DSL? Up to August of 2000, I was in the process of moving to Quebec, Quebec (City), Canada. One of my many reasons for this was the fact that they were much more technologically advanced, with regard to mass communication, especially the internet.
Bell Canada was offering a DSL-like system, which basically blew away any connection I had ever used short of a public university server. The system uses the long-unused yellow and black wires of the existing telephone system for the internet, and the red and green for the phone. A nortel modem conects to the phone jack just like a standard phone would, and you have.... yes
1Megabit UPLOAD and DOWNLOAD!!!!!. I first thought that something was being mistranslated from french, but the customer service person was japanese and spoke perfect english. The demo was a quick download on what was napster, 4 files simultaneously, in about 15 seconds, coming from Montreal. We then tried connecting to a site and uploading some files. Same great speed. The service rep then told me that they would be upgrading the system at the end of the year, and that it would be running at 4 Megabits Upload/Download.
And all for $29.95/month, plus $10 for the modem rental (ok, that's $39.95!) Canadian dollars!
I then asked how much it was for the total, with telephone. He informed me that local phone service was included with the service. I explained to him how crappy our computer connections were, and that there was this strange problem with upload always being less than download in the US.
So, for all of you who think that two wire copper cannot send high-speed data, you are just plain wrong. It is our money-hungry telephone giants, who have tried to do everything but upgrade their vastly obsolete telephone networks...much less replace them with high speed internet. In many places in the US, we are using wires for phone that are many times 40 years old, corrodded, brittle, and othewise unreliable. Then, mix every possible different type of digital and analogue technology together, and make them all talk. What a big mess. Phone companies need to let competition in to take over, or get going on new networks. After all, high speed internet is the death of their business. (I have already disconnected my phone, don't use it enough to substantiate the bill)
Broadband will survive, as the internet is a permanent part of world communication. Excite at home can go - apparently it wasn't so exciting!
The upload/download speed issue shows three major things:
1. You can only download as fast as you can upload. This should be a basic principle of logic, but what they want you do is to download from non-"home" run sites, such as excite, aol, yahoo, e-bay etc., all which generate money, and pay big bucks to run big servers. ISPs are taking the cheap way around this, as they are doing everything possible to avoid putting expensive servers up. If the everybody had the ability to run their own site, advertising monopolies like clearchannel, gannett, hearst-argyle and fox would go out of business.
2. The internet, which started out as just that, has become the direct-connect net. For example, when using telephones, to do a conference/multi-party call, your phone is connected to a swithcher, which is connected, initially to another phone. When another person joins, they connect at the nearest switch which is part of the connection, not your phone directly. That was the way the internet was originally supposed to work. Now, the big companies such as AT+T, and public universities, are stuck with all of the interconnect traffic. Therefore, if you serve or upload, all the people connecting are directed to your modem. Thus, it is no different than a dumb telephone connection, which does basically the same thing, except that instead of breaking off somewhere down the line, 3 lines are all running to you, which wastes lots of bandwidth.
3. Consumers rate or view the actual speed of a service by its upload speed, not its download speed. Everybody that is waiting out the technology will continue to wait, until the ISPs are confident, and have matched upload and download speeds. This shows their systems stability, reliability, and consistency.