I speculated that DSL would be more symmetrical than cable, because of the way DOCSIS 1.x worked, but it hasn’t worked out that way. The Comcast line of services is the most symmetrical high-speed home offering short of the 20/20 plan Verizon offers, with asymmetry ratios ranging from 4.5:1 to 8:1. AT&T’s vDSL ranges from 6:1 all the way to 12:1, and they won’t sell you more than 1.5 Mbps upstream for all the money in the world. They offer a low-ball 1.5 Mbps down, 1.0 Mbps up option, but I doubt many people buy it for the symmetry.

Most of the demand for broadband bandwidth is to accommodate video downloads as people begin to supplement cable tv with VoD. The Netflix deal with TiVo is a good example: I watched a movie from Netflix via TiVo over the Comcast network last night that was alleged to be HD. I’ve been using Netflix streaming over the HTPC I have connected to the same TV set, but the TiVo implementation has better audio and is easier to control.

It seems to me that the principal driver for upstream bandwidth is P2P, which the carriers are beginning to embrace as it becomes domesticated by P4P, caching, and the IETF efforts. At some point, the carriers will actually be the ones pushing more symmetrical broadband in order to relieve their own P2P-related transit costs; it’s much better for them to keep the transfer in the neighborhood.

So what we’ve seen in the last five years is broadband becoming both faster and more symmetrical, with the carriers (other than AT&T) becoming boosters of fatter upstream pipes.

Neither of us predicted the 20/20 service five years ago, for example, but there it is.

“Performance” — $42.95 for 8Mbps/2Mbps
“Performance Plus” — $52.95 for 16Mbps/2Mbps
“Ultra” — $62.95 for 22Mbps/5Mbps
“Extrme” — $139.95 for 50Mbps/10Mbps

Customers can double their downstream at “Performance Plus” for $10. They less than double it at “Ultra” for another $10. Now they’re at $63. They more than double that when they jump to “Extreme” at $140. But that’s a helluva lot more money than they’ve ever spent for Internet — especially when the primary offering is still TV.

Thus the marketing here encourages users to stick with one of the two bottom tiers, regardless of their upstream demand. And Comcast is right to assume that downstream is what matters most, to the most people. That will probably always be the case.

So I also agree that the upstream demand isn’t there yet. My main point is that it will be. At some time in the future, demand for upstream capacity will drive some carriers to compete on that feature. (In fact, Verizon is already doing that, though not very aggressively. Yet.)

It is inevitable that data demands will exceed TV and telephony demands. This is already starting to happen with cellular systems as well. The iPhone is a data device that also happens to be a phone. It’s also a harbinger. When data demands reach that point, upstream capacity will become much more of a selling feature for the carriers.

I look forward to productive competition there, and minimal regulatory interference with it.

I think all three could do a better job of competing. RCN (the other fiber company) only offers 2Mb upstream and in every respect appears not interested in providing more than a subset of what Verizon offers with FiOS on the same poles. (Or did the last time I checked.) They should zig to Verizon’s zag, and (at the very least) target the large tech/academic population here with services that appeal to them. But for now that’s a quibble. What matters is that we don’t have a duopoly here.

So, what makes our neighborhood a paradise is not that we can get 20Mb symmetrical service from somebody, but that there is a competitive market here.

If I had more time, I’d have already gotten my advanced sneakernet design up and running. The basic idea is to carry your stuff around, plug in to a family or friends PC, and have it automatically distribute things while you visit. (Straight up copy of content, disk to disk).

If the internet were free and the ends were secure, we could just share folders with the people we trust…. perhaps some day we’ll get there. For now we have to use Flickr, YouTube and others as a guarantee of the safety of our stuff against virii, worms, etc.