SubscribeTroy Wolverton had a problem. He wanted to send 170 pictures to Kodak to arrange to have them printed in time for Father’s Day. It turned out to be a true labor of love, as he waited hours to send the 800 megabytes of imagery to Kodak’s online processor.
Troy Wolverton writes tech news for the Mercury News in California
As more than three hours passed, Wolverton began to ponder why the upload seemed some poky. He subscribes to Earthlink, which supplied him with a 3Mbps connection. Assuming that speed was available for both uploading and downloading, it would have taken less than an hour to get the job done. But as virtually every customer of an Internet service provider finds, your download speed is many times faster than your upload speed. In this case, Wolverton was suffering with a 384kbps upload speed to get those photos to Kodak.
In fact, while download speeds have been increasing at a steady clip, many have discovered upload speeds have barely budged, if at all, since broadband service became available in their area, often more than a decade ago. Rochester, New York is one such example. Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service was introduced officially in 1998 with a download speed of around 5Mbps, but the upload was just 384kbps. Today, standard Road Runner service provides 10Mbps for downloads, but the upload speed has remain unchanged, despite more than a decade having passed.
Networks were originally designed to provide more speed for downloading, and less for uploading, based on the presumption subscribers would take more than they “gave” to the Internet. That remains essentially true today, but subscribers are increasingly relying on their upload connection to send pictures, movie clips, and other larger files to their friends, family, or work.
But broadband companies seem oblivious to this trend. If you look at the plans offered by the Bay Area’s two main providers, Comcast and AT&T, it’s all but impossible to find one in which the upload speed comes anywhere close to the download speed. To get an upload speed that’s faster than a slow download rate, you have to subscribe to one of the pricier plans, like Comcast’s Extreme 50, which gives you a 10 megabit per second upload connect — at a cost of $100 a month.
Comcast and AT&T officials say they are watching consumer Internet usage trends. They note that as their companies have ramped up download speeds, they’ve tended to increase upload speeds as well and will continue to do so. The download and upload speeds they offer are simply a response to market demand, they say, claiming that the vast majority of their customers still download far more data than they upload.
“We’re designing our products based on how we see consumers using them,” John Britton, an AT&T spokesman, told me.
Wolverton thinks the lack of competition also has a lot to do with it.
In terms of Internet access providers, the Bay Area essentially has a duopoly. There are numerous small players such as EarthLink, but Comcast and AT&T dominate — and duopolies tend to not have a good read on real market demand. People often buy one of their products because they don’t have any other choices — not because they meet their needs.
In other words, if the market were more competitive, a company might be able to build a successful business by catering to people who want faster upload speeds.
Just because consumers use their connections to download more data than they upload isn’t proof that they don’t want to upload more. The slow speeds could well discourage folks from doing more uploading. And they may well find a use for faster upload speeds — if they had them.
I’d love to be able to back up the videos, songs and documents on my computer to a server on the Internet. But with my slow upload connection, that’s not really an option because it would take days of uninterrupted uploading to back up any significant portion of my hard drive.
Other stories of interest:
- Damage Control Technique #1: Increase Speeds in San Antonio
- Californians Launch Class Action Lawsuit Against HughesNet for Slow, Capped Service
- Competition Equals Better, Faster Service: Fiber Is Good For You!
- Time Warner Tosses Customers Powerboost Bone? Now Hit Your Usage Cap Faster Than Ever!
- Comcast Announces 250GB Monthly Cap On Broadband Users Effective October 1st
While I’m not fan of Time Warner, it should be stated that Standard Road Runner is 384Kbps upstream, but Road Runner Turbo (for an addition $10/mo premium) bumps that up to approximately 1Mbps upstream bandwidth.
In the time I had Turbo I never achieved a full 1Mbps upload speed, but got into the mid-900s which is still more than twice as fast and helped the transfer speeds of large files from my machine to any remote host.
Eventually I decided that the extra $120/year was not worth the upload speed alone and my download speed (with the introduction of PowerBoost to every subscriber) no longer provided a significant distinction between Standard and Turbo.
As we’ve seen, what RR delivers will vary with the amount of competition they have. Here in Hawaii, where RR has a robust DSL competitor from the local telco, the standard home RR plan is 5mbps down/1mbps up. You can get the Turbo plan, but that only bumps you to 8mbps down.
Also interestingly enough, RR here started playing bursty games a couple months ago, so you no longer get accurate results from bandwidth testing sites. I know I’m still only getting 5mbps down, as my BitTorrent speeds still reflect that, but any bandwidth tester shows me as getting between 10-12mbps speeds.
Heh, I remember back before December when my Verizon line ran at 128kbps (16KB/s). I could only upload roughly 60MB an hour. That meant that since my Frontier line ran at 3Mbps/384kbps, that line was uploading gigabytes a night at times, from my HD gaming videos, to backups of my files, to just normal usage of the line (ACKs, pings, etc). Now the Verizon line uploads at 1Mbps/384kbps, even though I can easilly get 3Mbps/768kbps service on it, I’m waiting for FiOS where I can get a huge boost and hopefully symmetrical speeds in the process (which they’re doing 25Mbps/25Mbps, and 35Mbps/35Mbps at the moment as reported by people at DSL Reports). I still have to do uploads overnight at times, such as my HD gaming videos taking 2 and a half hours to upload to FileFront, and then the same amount of time to YouTube as well. Sure, I can get Roadrunner which will give me 15Mbps (Powerboosted)/2Mbps, but seeing as though my area is still DOCSIS 1.1 from the Adelphia days and my neighborhood is still having speed problems, I’d much rather be with the DSL.
I can say though, that the boost in upload did in fact make the Verizon line more snappy when it comes down to loading things up, and the extra upload allows me to be able to upload and download at the same time, with each path running at nearly full speed and with decent latency.
But yes, everyone needs more upload. I cringe if I see people still running at 128kbps or worse upload (and these are the same people who ask me for assistance as to why their pictures take so long to send via e-mail). I’d say for at least the most basic plans, 384kbps is good enough, but then the middle-basic plans of 768kbps would be good, and then the middle plans would have 1.5Mbps (T1 speeds) and the higher plans be breaking 2Mbps+
Apparently the key here is COMPETITION. We were at our daughter’s house this weekend in Maryland (DC area). FiOS is available there, but our daughter has Comcrap (Comcast). They were suspicious of their Internet connection on an old computer so I ran a speed test via my laptop through WiFi (g). Got 15Mbps down and 3Mbps up!
I have been a subscriber with Road Runner since the mid 90′s in one of the 3 original test sites. There were improvements in the first few years in the service. Unfortunately things have been stagnant for many more years. Why am I still limited to 52 KB/s upload speed? Service should get better over time not stay the same. For spending more than $5,000 on internet service of the years I think I should have a faster upload speed…
I guess you were a lucky one. A couple of years (forgot how many) after introduction we were put down to 2-3Mb/s connection speed. It wasn’t until Frontier rolled out their DSL service that RR eventually put their service back to what it was at the begining – not in one fell swoop, but Frontier and TW one upped each other for a time, until we got back to the original speed. After that, the only speed boost that was rolled out here was turbo.