[Miles]

Weird... I always thought fiber was generally symmetrical. Unless they are just artificially limiting things. But I have no technical knowledge here anyway - I might just be lucky.

In my country, they give symmetrical fiber only to businesses. For home is asymmetrical, e.g., 200/20.

[Taku]

I think a lot of the asymmetry in The States are due to pressures from media outlets back in the day. Napster set us up to expect that our uploading ability should be marginalized to deter piracy, and we've just accepted that upload speeds are going to be 1/10 or less of our download speeds. That and most people don't need high upload speeds.

And I can verify that my ISP (Spectrum/Charter) throttles P2P traffic. Torrenting is fine if I'm downloading, but even with 12Mbps upload, I can never crack 1Mbps combined speed in qBittorrent. No matter what I try to set up. Even with a VPN or a tunnel. I max out at 1.

It's anti-piracy. Even if the files aren't pirated.

[Miles]

...and we've just accepted that upload speeds are going to be 1/10 or less of our download speeds. That and most people don't need high upload speeds...

For home use you only need download speed, unless you're live streaming to a large audience. That's why businesses get symmetrical speeds, to host services for example.