On 2/27/2015 11:03 AM, Bruce H McIntosh wrote:
The REAL evil in the ISP marketplace is, of course, essentially entirely unremarked-upon - ASYMMETRY. For the Internet, as such, truly to live up to its promise to continue to revolutionize the world through free exchange of ideas, information, data and so forth, Joe Average User *MUST* have the same pipes going UP as he does coming DOWN. Just as an example, my service at home is what, 50 down/5 up? That structure is less conducive to free interchange and more conducive to the Big-Brother™-seal-of-approval mindless consumption of whatever content THEY™ deem necessary and sufficient to keep the bread and circus masses dull and uninvolved. Plus, the slow uplink speeds make remote backups dreadfully impractical for the home user. So let's see some symmetry in the offerings, ISPs, ok?
I'm all for this, except many technologies don't allow for it. Even if they did, you might see a lot less down in exchange for that upload. That may be fine for some, but would be undesired by others. I laugh every time I see a billboard locally that says, "Enjoy your free speed upgrade". They switched all their customers from ADSL to ADSL2 and gave them a slight download increase. Of course, ADSL2 has a slower upload limit. 500k may not seem a lot, but when you only had 1.5m to begin with, it's a considerable amount.