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Old 09-04-2003, 12:49 AM   #9 (permalink)
olympusxp
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My cable is 3.5Mbps down and 384kbps up...pretty crappy. I wish I could get at least 1Mbit or something.

Magus, the upload speed is not lowered or "capped" to discourage piracy, it is due to the technical limitations of frequency use in cable and ADSL lines. For example, on cable, when you are upload/downloading at the same time, your download speed will eventually sync down to the same speed as your upload. This is the same for DSL. Companies put your upload speed lower to sort of "pad" your download speed a bit, so when you are uploading at full potential it won't f**k with your download speed much (however, your latency/ping will still go WAY UP).

If your download/upload speed were the same on regular cable and ADSL lines, your speed would be shit if your lucky, but most likely your latency would be horrible (timing out almost) without proper support from the headend. The only way to effectively give you more upload speed on cable is to increase the download speed as well. However, this would get very expensive for the cable company to buy its bandwidth (from companies like UUNET, AT&T, Level3, Qwest, etc.) and overall speed in the neighborhood would go down.

Another reason why SDSL is so expensive.

Fiber optics (DS3, OC-3, OC-X) don't have this problem.
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