I was recently at a public meeting about broadband in Davis, California and got a good reminder of why upload speeds are as important to a community as download speeds. One of the people making public comments talked about how uploading was essential to his household and how the current broadband products on the market were not sufficient for his family.

This man needed good upload speeds for several reasons. First, he works as a photographer and takes pictures and shoots videos. He says that it takes hours to upload and send raw, uncompressed video to one of his customers and says the experience still feels like the dial-up days. His full-time job is working as a network security consultant for a company that specializes in big data. As such he needs to send and receive large files, and his home upload bandwidth is also inadequate for that – forcing him to go to an office for work that could otherwise be done from his home. Finally, his daughter creates YouTube content and has the same problem uploading content – which is particularly a problem when her content deals with time-sensitive current events and waiting four hours to get the content to YouTube kills the timeliness of her content.

This family is not unusual any more. A decade ago, a photographer led the community effort to get faster broadband in a city I was working with. But he was the only one asking for faster upload speeds and most homes didn’t care about it.

Today a lot of homes need faster upload speeds. This particular family had numerous reasons including working from home, sending large data files and posting original content to the web. But these aren’t the only uses for faster upload speeds. Gamers now need faster upload speeds. Anybody who wants to remotely check their home security cameras cares about upload speeds. And more and more people are migrating to 2-way video communications, which requires those at both ends to have decent uploading. We are just now seeing the early trials of virtual presence where communications will be by big-bandwidth virtual holograms at each end of the communications.

Davis is like many urban areas in that the broadband products available have slow upload speeds. Comcast is the cable incumbent, and while they recently introduced a gigabit download product, their upload speeds are still paltry. DSL is offered by AT&T which has even slower upload speeds.

Technologies differ in their ability to offer upload speeds. For instance, DSL is technically capable of sending the data at the same speeds for upload or download. But DSL providers have elected to stress the download speed, which is what most people value. So DSL products are set with small upload and a lot of download. It would be possible to give a customer the choice to vary the mix between upload and download speeds, but I’ve never heard of an ISP who tried to provide this as an option to customers.

Cable modems are a different story. Historically the small upload speeds were baked directly into the DOCSIS standard. When Cable Labs created DOCSIS they made upload speeds small in response to what cable companies asked from them. Until recently, cable companies have had no option to increase upload speeds beyond the DOCSIS constraints. But Cable Labs recently amended the new DOCSIS 3.1 standard to allow for much upload speeds of nearly a gigabit. The first release of the new DOCSIS 3.1 standard didn’t include this, but it’s now available.

However, a cable company has to make sacrifices in their network if they want to offer faster uploads. It takes about 24 empty channels (meaning no TV signal) on a cable system to provide gigabit download speeds. A cable company would need to vacate many more channels of programming to also offer faster uploads and I don’t think many of them will elect to do so. Programming is still king and cable owners need to balance the demand for more channels compared to demand for faster uploads.

Fiber has no real constraints on upload speeds up to the capability of the lasers. The common technologies being used for residential fiber all allow for gigabit upload speeds. Many fiber providers set speeds to symmetrical, but others have elected to limit upload speeds. The reason I’ve heard for that is to limit the attractiveness of their network for spammers and others who would steal the use of fast uploading. But even these networks offer upload speeds that are far faster than the cable company products.

As more households want to use uploading we are going to hear more demands for a faster upload option. But for now, if you want super-fast upload speeds you have to be lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with fiber-to-the-home.