Consumer broadband connections in the US are almost all "asymmetric" connections—that is, out of the total amount of bandwidth available, more bandwidth is allocated to the "download" direction than to the "upload" direction. This decision made sense 15 years ago when DSL connections were first gaining momentum. The Internet—and specifically the World Wide Web—was far more of a consumption-oriented construct then. People were more interested in reading or watching content than in putting up their own. We wanted, needed, fast download speeds, and broadband providers jumped at the chance to differentiate themselves from dial-up ISPs by offering fast always-on connections and by using as much of that bandwidth as possible to send data to users.

The story today is very, very different. Download speeds are still important (by some estimates, just a bit under half of all Internet traffic is from people watching Netflix and YouTube videos), but it's become far easier to create content, too. The ability to actually share anything that you've created relies on being able to upload that content.

Slow upload speeds are a problem even my mother has commented on—and when my mother starts commenting on a technical issue, that's when I know that it's absolutely a mainstream concern. She enjoys making videos of things she's painted and of new plants in the backyard garden, then uploading those videos to YouTube to share with her friends. But she's stymied by how long it takes to upload her videos, even if they're relatively short. She and my father are trapped by Comcast into an overly expensive residential cable modem plan with a grossly asymmetric download/upload ratio. Explaining the problem to her yielded the common sense observation, "Well, that's just stupid. How am I supposed to share videos if it takes longer to get them to YouTube than it does to film them in the first place?"

It gets worse. Near-ubiquitous cloud service provider Dropbox announced last week that it is introducing a set of APIs to allow applications and services to seamlessly sync across devices; their eventual goal is to supplant local storage by making a user's entire "data footprint" remote and cloud-based. This is great news, but whenever I read about a new feature like this it rings hollow to me. The real issue that must first be addressed is how much additional upload bandwidth this type of thing will require—and how disappointed am I going to be when I actually use an app that implements it? It's like the first time a new cloud-backup customer sits down and realizes that while backing up all of their hundreds of gigabytes in the cloud sounds like a great idea, it's gonna take a month to actually upload everything the first time.

Thus, when I'm choosing a broadband plan, the first thing I look for isn't the download speed, the provider, or really even the price—the first thing I look for is the upload speed. More than any other factor, the upload speed of a broadband connection determines its desirability to me. And it should for you, too.

Free the data

I am in love with the idea of total data mobility. I've got terabytes of video and audio and other personal data on my home NAS, and it's configured so that I can access it via the Internet. In theory, I'm already ahead of Dropbox's vision—my data can already "follow" me, and I shouldn't need USB sticks or DVDs if I need to watch a movie while I'm on vacation. In practice, though, it doesn't work that way: the impossible-to-overcome barrier of the teeny-tiny soda straw of upload bandwidth I'm allotted makes it impractical to actually use my media remotely. I can stream a video, but often-big high-definition files are impossible to access, at least not without constant hiccup-ing. I can copy archived applications to reinstall on my laptop if I'm remote but only at very slow speeds.

It's easy to solve the technical issues involved in remote access—the mechanisms of securing the content and making it easy for me to access and difficult for outsiders. The issue is one of bandwidth, since my upload bandwidth at home is the speed at which I can download from my servers when I'm remote. It's extremely frustrating to be so close to the ideal, fully mobile situation I want to be in but to have no good way to actually cross that final step to fully realize it. And if I want to share something with friends, it's ridiculous that in 2013 we still have to resort to sneakernet and USB sticks. The situation is no better than it was back in junior high when we traded data on floppies because our 2400bps modems were too slow.

The idea of total personal data mobility isn't something that the average user has much exposure to yet, because the idea is so far-fetched with current US home broadband plans that it might as well be science fiction. My mom, with her frustration about uploading YouTube videos, doesn't really need to share her videos straight off her own computer—but that's in part because US broadband consumers are on the wrong end of a broadband cartel-constructed chicken-and-egg problem. Why would we need tons of upload bandwidth to share our photos and movies and all of the other things that make up our digital lives when other services already exist to fill those needs? Because YouTube and those other services don't fill those needs—not nearly well enough, anyway. With constrained upload pipes like most folks have, the wide-spread distribution of user-created content relies on the assistance of broadband cartel-friendly helpers like YouTube—sites which degrade the things people have created by sandwiching them between unwanted advertising, and which remove clearly non-infringing content at the drop of a perjurious hat. User-generated content production will benefit from speedier distribution—the noise level will certainly rise as more folks post movies of worthless things, but the signal ratio is guaranteed to rise with the noise.

If they built it, we would use it. Huge Internet names have sprung into being to serve the content that we can't serve ourselves—more accurately, to monetize that content. If we could serve our own stuff, we wouldn't have to license away our content and let YouTube slap advertisements all over it.

Is it all so bad?

Some US broadband providers do indeed provide adequate upload speeds. FiOS, for example, has a relatively affordable symmetrical 20Mbps plan (20Mbps of download bandwidth, 20Mbps of upload bandwidth) in my area. But unfortunately, although FiOS is available in my area, it isn't available on my street (and, according to Verizon, it never will be).

Since I'm on a Comcast business-class connection, the next tier up from my current tier of 16Mbps-down/3Mbps-up only bumps my upload speed to 5Mbps—but it adds another $40 per month onto my bill. I know I said that upload speeds trump price, but there are limits. It doesn't trump price quite enough for me to justify almost $500 more per year for a measly additional 2Mbps.

The "consumer" mindset, the idea that the average Internet user should be fed pre-approved content produced by pre-approved sources but not generate any content on their own, is outdated and simply wrong. In a world of sanely allocated symmetric broadband plans, YouTube would be peripheral to the main distribution and sharing sources—their enormous distributed bandwidth would still be required for Big Content's movies and for "viral" videos, but for sharing that video of your garden or of your kids dancing around? You could host it yourself, directly, free of interference.

I'd vote with my dollars for more upload speed, but since I'm trapped in a duopoly (Comcast cable vs. Verizon's ludicrously outdated, ridiculously slow DSL service) I really don't have any vote at all.

We have things to say and we have data to share. Give us more upload bandwidth.