We Should Count All Bandwidth Equally - Up And Down
[Commentary] One of Daily's biggest pet peeves in broadband debates is the over-emphasis on download speeds and the lack of sufficient attention being paid to upload speeds. When talking about bandwidth goals, they're download first, upload second. When providers are advertising the capacity of their networks, it's the download number in big font, with upload hidden elsewhere. Often times this devolves into people referring to broadband only based on its download capacity. This causes a serious problem for consumer awareness about upstream capacity. If providers with inadequate upstream capacity aren't talking about it then the average consumer may not realize the difference in the value they're receiving for their broadband buck, which calls into question the efficacy of a market where customers aren't making informed decisions. We should count all bandwidth equally when defining the service level that broadband delivers. Rather than allowing providers to tout their downstream speeds in bold and hide their upstream, they should be required to most prominently display the total bandwidth they're providing. So if a provider offers a service that promises 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up then they'd have to say their broadband service is offering 55Mbps of total bandwidth.
We Should Count All Bandwidth Equally - Up And Down