On 28/02/2015 22:38, Barry Shein wrote:
Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from deploying "commercial" services.
there were several reasons for asymmetric services, one of which was commercial. Another was that most users' bandwidth profiles were massively asymmetric to start with so it made sense for consumers to have more bandwidth in one direction than another. Another still was that cross-talk causes enough interference to prevent reverse adsl (i.e. greater bandwidth from customer to exchange) from working well.
As were bandwidth caps.
Bandwidth caps were introduced in many cases to stop gratuitous abuse of service by the 1% of users who persistently ran their links at a rate that the pricing model they selected was not designed to handle. You've been around the block a bit so I'm sure you remember the days when transit was expensive and a major cost factor in running an isp. Some operators used and continue to use asymmetric bandwidth profiles and bandwidth caps as methods for driving up revenue rather than anything else in particular. International cellular roaming plans come to mind as one of the more egregious example of this, but there are many others. Nick