

If you don’t have the latest, you may not be keeping up with the ISP’s upgrades. Update your modem and router firmware.However, if your upload speeds are significantly lower than what you paid for, and they seem to be that way consistently, here are a few things you can try before making that dreaded tech support call:

Unfortunately, if you’ve only been allocated two Mbps, and that’s about what you’re getting, your only way up is to pay for a higher tier. If you have laggy video or keep getting killed in multiplayer games, you’re probably looking for a way to improve your upload speeds. For cost and logistical reasons, some connections remain asymmetric, though these speeds are still typically more than enough, so fiber is still the most solid option for those in need of upload speed.Īlso read: How to Improve Internet Speed for Streaming How do I get faster upload speeds? Thus, fiber for both individuals and businesses tends to be symmetric.ĮPB Fiber in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, offers a frankly insane ten Gbps down / ten Gbps up. While DSL and coaxial cable connections are typically constrained by a low upper bandwidth limit, fiber optic cables can carry so much data so fast that allocating some space to downstream at the expense of upstream is practically unnecessary. There’s not much room for more bandwidth in copper wires, so keeping the lines biased toward download is probably for the best. Most DSL is ADSL, where the “A” stands for “Asymmetric,” so the disparity is pretty much baked into the standard. The download and upload streams operate on two different frequencies above the voice frequency, which being fairly high, decay pretty quickly over any distance. It uses the same copper lines that your telephone does, so it’s not exactly built for speed.

It makes sense then to have at least a two-to-one download-upload ratio.Īlso read: How to Properly Check Your Internet Speed DSLĭigital Subscriber Line (or DSL) is fairly slow, but it does a decent job of relaying Internet over the last mile or two. During peak times they might max out the coaxial cable’s download bandwidth while leaving the upload channel fairly open. If everyone in an apartment building has fifty Mbps up and fifty Mbps down, all of their data is probably going to one coax cable connected to the building. Asymmetry is actually importantĭSL, cable, and fiber connections need to be divided into different streams for download and upload, and since they all have limits on how much information you can pack into them, privileging download over upload is usually better. Why the asymmetry? In general, ISPs are considering two things: there is a lot more demand for downstream bandwidth than for upstream, and there is a technical limit to how much traffic their lines can carry.
