4 ms·

> The problem is that in most of the world, consumer internet connections are highly asymmetric, and people have terrible uplinks I am wondering how did we end

• sly010 5y ago
  Just guessing, but maybe is the natural consequence of asymmetric last-mile internet technologies like (ADSL/cable) where you _must_ allocate separate bands for up/down. This is even true for LTE I think.
  • pmayrgundter 5y ago
    This, and most users are just that, users, and not producers, so they value/pay for high download bandwidth and mostly don't care about upload. Upload bandwidth costs money, and not many will pay for it, so we get what we pay for. This is changing over time as the aggregate upstream load from mostly passive users nevertheless becomes greater than a video upload stream, eg because people are face timing and gaming, etc.. so presumably we'll reach a tipping point where enough people have the excess up to support a growing set of always cached content. İ think this is the long game for distributed fileaystems, eg ipfs
• nicoburns 5y ago
  TL;DR: It was the only way to get broadband downlink speeds over copper telephone lines.