Only the "last mile" of residential connections (and often business, if they can't justify the cost of a full fibre connection in their current location). Up t

Only the "last mile" of residential connections (and often business, if they can't justify the cost of a full fibre connection in their current location). Up to 33k6 modems home internet was generally symmetrical: the same speed up and down. 56k6 standards introduced asymmetry: it wasn't easy (i.e. inexpensively with that era's tech) to reliably transmit at the faster rates over copper in both directions (in fact it was rare in one direction - it wasn't often I saw faster than 48k, IIRC 45k was what I'd usually get) so the upstream was half of down. If I was uploading anything like photos of force the connection down to 33k6 at the upstream rate would be 33k6 rather than 24k or less. This continued with ADSL and then FTTC: the signalling frequencies used are allocated in a way that gives preference to downstream speed. This is a good compromise for most home users who download far more than they send back, but inconvenient when setting up (to pick one example from many) large videos recorded on modern phones, which is something many home users might want to do regularly. I currently get ~55mbit/13mbit and I'd much rather have it more balanced (something like 24mbit/24mbit?). I'll be upgrading to FTTP as soon as the cables they install a month or so ago are enabled, not for better downstream (it isn't often that ~55mbit is a significant inconvenience) but for better upstream. Full fibre doesn't have the limits of copper connections that force the choice of how to portion limited frequencies, not just because full fibre has cleaner signalling (so far reliable throughout) anyway, but also because it is synchronous: unlike with copper the signals from each side don't interfere with each other. (Copper needn't have this limitation but to work around it you'd need to double up the number of wires and even then at the speeds offered many would prefer such a bonded arrangement to give faster downstream at the expense of upstream)