While uploading a slew of pictures to a photo-printing site last week, I was reminded that the "A" in ADSL stands for "Asymmetric." The upload took twenty minutes—suddenly, I was back in my parents' house, downloading Wolfenstein 3D over a 2400 baud connection that was destined to fail when my mother lifted the upstairs phone from its cradle to make a call. Today's Net users don't like to wait, and they're not used to doing so, but as users increasingly become content creators, they may be forced to learn patience.
That's because few broadband connections in the US are symmetric; uploading and downloading occur at different speeds. AT&T's DSL, for instance, offers up to 1.5Mbps for $19.99 a month, but that only comes with 384Kbps of upload speed. Even superfast connections like Comcast's 8Mbps links are still stuck in the 768Kbps tar pits when it comes to upload speeds. It's a minor inconvenience to some, but a big deal to others, like 21-year old Jay Glatfelter of Raleigh, NC.
Glatfelter produces a "Lost" podcast that he creates each week after the show airs. By the time he finishes, it's early morning, and waiting for the file to upload is tough to do. "At 3 in the morning, that's really brutal," Glatfelter tells the AP. "It's an extra 40 minutes and you want to go to sleep."
The idea is that, as the Web goes "2.0" and beyond, user-generated content will play an increasing role, and upload speeds will be a choke point for sharing that content. Even if you're not convinced that homemade video clips and mashups will one day rule the media landscape, it's still not hard to see that upload speeds are going to be more important in the future. Peer-to-peer is hot right now, of course, but it could grow exponentially if the new P2P video services (like BitTorrent, Zudeo, and the Venice Project) take off.
But for now (and for the forseeable future), downloading will still rule the broadband jungle and providers have shown little inclination to uncork the upload pipes.
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