Hands up if your broadband ISP makes the upload (upstream) speed of your Internet package clear on their advertising? We thought not. Sadly only a few of the major ISPs even bother to advertise upload performance and those that do only tend to show it on certain products. But how fast you can push information into the online world does matter and its importance is growing.<\/p>\n
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After a quick look at how broadband is advertised by most of the mainstream providers, which tend to focus almost exclusively on the download (downstream) performance of their connections, you’d easily be forgiven for thinking that Internet traffic only goes in one direction.<\/p>\n
In fairness, how many people pay attention to the speed at which a car can reverse? The focus is inevitable always on forward motion in Miles Per Hour<\/strong> (MPH) because that’s the direction in which you spend most of your time travelling. But the Internet is more complex than a motorcar because both directions, currently measured in Megabits per second (Mbps), are always being utilised; albeit one usually more so than the other.<\/p>\n Indeed most of what you do online is ‘download’ orientated, so it makes sense for ISPs to focus on that and avoid the confusion of uploads. Every time you load a new webpage or email, pull a file from a server or stream video online it’s the download side of your connection that gets tested the most, with uploads usually just existing to confirm the request and exchange a few basic details with the remote server.<\/p>\n Similarly the majority of Internet connection technologies, except for the very high-end pure fibre optic lines (FTTH<\/a>\/P) and specific business solutions, tend to be asymmetric<\/strong> in nature. Put another way, in order to make the best use of the available connection capability, download performance is given preference over the less essential upload component.<\/p>\n For example, standard copper line based ADSL2+ broadband can deliver up to 20Mbps download and a little over 1Mbps upload on a good connection. Even the top 80Mbps<\/strong> capable FTTC<\/a> lines still only deliver a maximum upload speed of 20Mbps, while Virgin Media<\/a>’s top 152Mbps<\/strong> product pegs the uploads even lower at 12Mbps.<\/p>\n So it’s perhaps little wonder that ISPs, much like car manufacturers, choose to focus on the biggest and most important number for downloads, while shunning uploads. Ironically upload speeds are usually a lot more stable than download performance, so they should be considerably easier for ISPs to market without the usual fear of inadvertently misleading consumers.<\/p>\n Let’s take a look at how some of the biggest providers fair when it comes to communicating upload performance as part of their primary promotions and comparisons.<\/p>\n Which Major UK ISPs Promote Upload Speeds?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n * BT<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n To their credit BT<\/a> do clearly state upload speeds on their “fibre” (FTTC) products, although the older standard broadband (ADSL2+) services only seem to reference the download speeds and uploads are nowhere to be seen.<\/em><\/p>\n * Virgin Media<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Virgin, perhaps fearful of looking weaker next to the rival FTTC services that they sometimes point towards as being inferior to their own cable (DOCSIS<\/a>) platform, make no mention of upload performance unless you dig deeper and hunt out their Traffic Management Thresholds.<\/em><\/p>\n * Sky Broadband<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Sky only makes a clear mention of download performance for the standard (ADSL2+) and fibre (FTTC) packages, while uploads are nowhere to be seen.<\/em><\/p>\n * TalkTalk<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Curiously TalkTalk<\/a> doesn’t even appear to mention download speeds for any of their services except the fibre (FTTC) solution and, once again, uploads get zero coverage in any kind of noticeable way.<\/em><\/p>\n * EE<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Like so many others above, EE<\/a> state the download performance for all of their packages, but there’s nothing about uploads.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n By comparison it should be noted that many smaller ISPs, such as Zen Internet<\/a>, do state the upload performance for all their services.<\/p>\n So What’s the Big Deal?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Over the past 5-6 years the online world has changed. More and more consumers are storing large quantities of data in the “cloud<\/em>“, uploading their personal video streams and ever high quality pictures via Facebook<\/strong> or YouTube<\/strong> and the number of multiplayer gaming systems that rely on BitTorrent<\/strong> (P2P) file sharing technology to manage live updates\/patch distribution has increased significantly (e.g. Steam, Xbox Live etc.).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A quick look around reveals that some of the big ISPs, such as BT and Virgin Media, even promote their own online and multi-GigaByte sized cloud\/storage services. Equally, modern video games are becoming more complex and some even allow you to share real-time picture and video content into the virtual world. Not to mention the separate importance of other services like FTP and web servers etc.<\/p>\n Crucially all of the above rely upon upload performance in order to get your data to where it\u2019s needed, but the experience can be painful. For example, let\u2019s say you can get a respectable 16Mbps from an ADSL2+ line and so even big downloads aren’t too much of a pain. So far so good, but if you’re not familiar with the asymmetric nature of that technology then you might end up being shocked at how long it takes to upload a 200MB video stream of your recent holiday to a private family YouTube channel (i.e. around 30mins on a 1Mbps line vs\u00a0roughly 2mins if the uploads also ran at 16Mbps).<\/p>\n On top of that it\u2019s so easy to consume all of the available bandwidth on a slow upload link that it can easily end up impacting the performance of everybody else sharing your network. Just try playing a multiplayer game while somebody else is uploading a video on an ADSL2+ service, it quickly turns into a slow and choppy experience.<\/p>\n Over the years ISPreview.co.uk has also received complaints from consumers who thought their connections were suffering from a problem because the speeds had dropped considerably, only for a quick investigation to reveal that the issue was actually to do with the fact that they didn’t realise upload speeds would be slower than downloads and thus felt misled by the ISP. In fairness some, albeit not all, providers do reflect a predicted upload speed when you first run a check during signup.<\/p>\n At the same time Ofcom<\/a> and the Advertising Standards Authority<\/a> (ASA) should share some of the blame for this situation by failing to encourage greater transparency of this aspect\u00a0among ISPs. The Government’s national Broadband Delivery UK<\/a> (BDUK) scheme has also focused its goals almost entirely around a minimum download speed of 24Mbps+, while completely ignoring any semblance of a target for upload performance.<\/p>\n On top of that ISPs could be missing a trick by ignoring uploads, which would help them to push the latest \u201csuperfast\u201d broadband services\u00a0because even those with currently good download performance from last-generation ADSL2+ service will suffer due to poor\u00a0uploads. The importance of this as a selling point should not be overlooked.<\/p>\n As content quality and sharing grows then issues like those highlighted above are likely to become increasingly common place and certainly we also see a lot more questions about upload performance now than we ever have in the past. Consumers are clearly waking up to its importance and perhaps the big ISPs should\u00a0start to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hands up if your broadband ISP makes the upload (upstream) speed of your Internet package clear on their advertising? We thought not. Sadly only a few of the major ISPs even bother to advertise upload performance and those that do only tend to show it on certain products. But how fast you can push information […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[99,474,471,405,36,66,74,475],"class_list":["post-6506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial_article","tag-asa","tag-bt","tag-bduk","tag-ee","tag-ofcom-regulation","tag-sky-broadband","tag-talktalk","tag-virgin-media"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"yoast_head":"\n