Troy 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.