Symmetrical
speed is when your download and upload speeds are the same. This is important
for many online activities that require uploading such as live-streaming, video
chat, or have cloud-based technology like wireless smart home security cameras.
If you’ve ever tried to sit through a class or business meeting and been met
with a glitchy, pixelated experience, or had to wait for a batch of files and
pictures to be uploaded to social media, your upload speed was likely to blame.
Pay
attention to the next cable internet advertisement you see, unlike fiber, you’ll notice that
they usually advertise only the download speed, which is for receiving data,
not sending. That number may look appealing, but it’s only half of the story.
Their upload speed is likely a tiny fraction of their download (around 10%),
which will impact your customer experience. This is what is referred to as “Asymmetrical”
internet.
You may
be asking why it’s so important to have a fast upload speed. It comes down to
one simple phrase, “network congestion”. We upload information all the time,
not just uploading a picture to Facebook, but every time we click on a link, or
type a search term into Google. That information travels from our browser to a server
to tell it what information it needs to send back. Every device that you use
adds a little more traffic onto your network, and if you’re stuck with a low
upload speed, something as simple as a family members smart phone backing up photos
could max out your speed. This will cause everything else to take longer and
become congested for a longer period, making you miss a crucial detail your
video conference or cause your cameras to stop uploading to the cloud just as that
package you’ve been waiting for is stolen off your porch.
When determining
what speed would be best for you, a general rule of thumb is applying 25 Mbps
to each person using the internet in the home and 10 Mbps to every device. If
that device is used to stream 4k videos, or a camera that is uploading HD
footage to cloud storage, you can increase that to 25 Mbps as well. This may
seem like a lot, and it is, but this is assuming every person and every device
is online at the same time ensuring that you’re unlikely to run into that “network
congestion” and provides you with a satisfactory customer experience.
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