I was recently asked an interesting question, “It’s easy to understand the growth in download bandwidth due to people streaming higher quality video and similar uses. Why do you think upload broadband usage is growing even faster?”
I first had to check to see if upload bandwidth usage is growing faster than download usage – and it is growing a little faster. According to OpenVault, average upload usage has increased 290% since 2019, while average download usage has increased by 270%. From 2022 to 2023, average upload bandwidth usage increased by 13.3%, while download usage increased by 9.3%. Average U.S. upload usage surpassed 40 gigabytes per customer per month at the end of 2023.
There are some obvious reasons why upload bandwidth usage has been growing. Compared to before the pandemic, Zoom and other video calls have become common. There is now a substantial percentage of people who work from home. Several studies I’ve seen and surveys we’ve conducted show that over 30% of homes have somebody who works at home at least part of each week – with many folks now working from home full time.
Much of the software that we use has migrated to the cloud, and that means folks routinely save documents and spreadsheets online when they work from home. Machine-to-machine language, where our computers and smart devices automatically contact websites is one of the fastest subsets of data usage. We’re using a lot more security cameras. Gaming has moved to the cloud.
But as I’ve been thinking about upload usage, I also think there has been a lot of pent-up demand that is getting slowly resolved as ISPs improve upload speeds. I talk to people about their home bandwidth a lot, and I realized that I probably know a dozen people who have told me that they have to ration upload broadband.
To give one of the more extreme examples, I have a friend in a household with two adults working at home and two older children who often game during the daytime. My friend has to routinely join web video session by cellphone because the home broadband can’t support an additional upload link. You might suppose this home is using a slow technology, but they’ve bought the fastest speed available from a major cable company. The upload bandwidth is just not enough to satisfy this home. If the cable companies upgrades the upload speed, or if fiber becomes available, this home is going to see a big spike in upload usage when family members are no longer blocked. They are routinely using all of the upload bandwidth available today but want to use a lot more.
It turns out that I know a lot of people who routinely have trouble connecting to video calls, and they talk about rationing upload speed. That’s one of the interesting things about this – folks who don’t have enough upload speed are fully aware of the situation. They routinely ask who else in the family is online before connecting. They ask other family members to cut back on usage when they need to make an important connection. It’s classic rationing behavior.
Businesses have this problem to an even greater extent than households. In a lot of communities, businesses are offered the same broadband packages that are sold to homes (but at a much higher price). Many businesses use upload bandwidth far more heavily than homes. They might use VoIP for multiple phone lines. They often want to have multiple people streaming at the same time. A huge percentage of business software and functions use cloud software that needs a constant upload path. Many businesses routinely open a VPN to connect with a distance corporate server. Many of the businesses we interview are acutely aware of the constraints placed on them by inadequate upload speeds.
We’re seeing ISPs bringing faster upload speeds, and this will ease a lot of these problems. Cable companies are upgrading upload speeds in some markets using mid-split upgrades or upgrading to early versions of DOCSIS 4.0. A lot of fiber is being built that offers symmetrical broadband speeds. The upcoming rural broadband grants are going to displace a lot of older and slower technology. As pent-up upload demand is resolved, we should continue to see average upload usage growing faster than download usage over the next few years.
I’m skeptical this is an upload speed problem.
First, cloud applications exactly *don’t* use tons of upload because the data resides in the cloud and you only fiddle with small parts of it, locally.
If you’re downloading it then re-uploading it, it’s not really a cloud application. (Cloud backups and security cameras are obvious exceptions but not usually what people think of when they talk about “cloud applications.”)
Second, the docsys speed is likely nearly irrelevant because that’s just the fastest it’s going to get from your house to the next nearest router. They can upgrade that connection until they’re blue in the face but if they don’t upgrade the pipe bandwidth up the line, you won’t get end-to-end speed increase, which is all anyone cares about.
Although, if a whole neighborhood or region gets upgraded, it can certainly produce enough increased demand (download at least, maybe plus upload) that the next router up the line gets overloaded causing packet loss if it’s not also upgraded in throughput (which could mean either more muscle or more bandwidth). So, ironically, some local increases in “speed” might be the cause of worse prime-usage-time performance.
The docsys connection speed seems to be used more as a marketing concept as anything.
Video call upload bandwidth is almost certainly not the reason you can’t connect to video calls — it’s the reason you’ll get “unstable internet” status from your video call application once it’s underway. If you can’t connect, it’s way more likely that whatever regional servers you’re trying to get a piece of from the video call provider are overloaded. [I speculate there’s a decent chance that your mobile provider could get routed to a different set of servers than your cable provider.]
This report is a little old but seems pretty on target: https://www.cartesian.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Cartesian_NCTA-US-Broadband-Household-Bandwidth-Demand-Study-July-2021.pdf
I’m probably underestimating the amount that people share excel files in OneDrive or GoogleDrive which they might download, change, upload. Or, shuffle files into Box or the like to share them. Again, I wouldn’t personally call that a “cloud application” but there are a lot of things about how the world works I might not agree with 🙂 And, that could be notable upload bandwidth.
In the old days p2p sharing apps (bittorrent, etc.) could consume a bunch of upload bandwidth but I don’t get the sense they’re used that much. Streaming killed the p2p star.
Anyway, the report claims that files are 3% of the upstream bandwidth, 50% more than video calls (twitch and the like are basically games with a video call stapled on). So, maybe I’m wrong about the amount that people do shuffle files down and back up. I’m skeptical, but I’m also wrong a lot 🙂