I know this isn't specifically Linux related but there are a lot of really smart people on this board who may have industry experience or professional experience in related fields.

I find the extremely limited upload speeds like a 15/1, 25/2 or 1.5/.128 (though the 128Kb make claims of 384 but it's often no where near that). Some packages may get a little bit better like 12/2 or 25/5 but pricing may cost 30-80% above their counterparts for a doubling of the upload speed. then there are the syncrounus of 5/5 which I was quoted at $300/month @ 6 months (promotion) then $429 for remaining 30 months!


I've studied the many DSL technologies, coax cable (Docsis 2 & 3), FiOS and even ethernet to the home. I have not seen any reason why synchronous speeds could not be allocated to those who need it. If a package of 15/1 is provided, that is a total of 16Mb of bandwidth (this industry has a strange way of using bandwidth anyway...)

On a full duplex ehternet connection, you get same speeds on send and receive, similar to what DSL can do with dual conductors but it is the provisioning on the ISP's end that decides where the "speed" goes.

It is like having a highway, each direction with 10 lanes and the provider saying that only 2-3 lanes on the north (upload) land can be used. MAYBE the other lanes are used to expand the download capacity but then that creates a lot of problems which I have never seen addressed in technical manuals. So is there potentially unused capacity on the one "stream"? Well, Some people I have talked to, think that it is used and us "little people" don't get to see this as it can be/is used for monitoring - one person even suggesting "hidden network protocols" to handle traffic such as this which is hidden/ecrypted and will show up as noise on a oscilliscope.

What made me start looking into this was a few tests on a 12/1 DSL connection where when the tech was on site I was getting outrageous speeds of 250mbps downstream and ~170mbps upstream! 10+ test on different sites and servers all proved that it wasn't a site problem. I was told the line could only support 6/1 (even though I had 15/1 for 3-4 years before this national company bought out the local company, cut speeds & upped rates) so to get 12/1 a new modem using 2 lines - (bonded) was needed which just so happened to have the VDSL2 which CAN support 400/400 both ways! This test happened on 3 occasions with the ISP tech in front of me and he couldn't (or wouldn't) explain it).. After Tens of hours on the phone with the ISP, no answers were provided and they still said I couldn't get more than 6/1 on my line!

So I want, as a consumer, to be able to have my speed adjusted on the fly (or within reason, maybe at set times) where my upload speed is bumped up so I can get some "work" done (not business - personal hobby stuff). his should be 100% possible with todays tech with a minimum of being able to split a bandwidth package (of say 15/1) to speeds of 8/8, giving the same potential bandwidth usage.

Well, I've said more than intended but this topic has me really p'd off and I've had to deal with tons of BS from the ISP's for almost 2 decades!. I'd love to hear some reasonable thoughts on this or other stories if people have experienced strange things as well.

It's because of the way throughput is billed. You are billed for the (usually) 90th percentile of your data usage, either up or down, whichever is higher.

Therefore if you are hosting web sites, mirroring repositories, etc., that will increase the ISP's upstream throughput. By limiting the customer's upstream you can allow yourself headroom. Since *most* people notice downstream throttling more than upstream, you also get less bitching.

At least that's my simple understanding.