said by severach:Imagine a network where everyone has infinite incomming and zero outgoing. It's free because it requires no infrastructure yet you can advertize great incomming bandwidth speeds. A small increase in outgoing bandwidth requires a large increase in the infrastructure to carry and deliver the potential load.
There is no money in providing download bandwith to consumers. There's lots of money providing bandwidth to server operators. Every byte received was sent from somewhere. The server operators have money so end up paying most of the infrastructure costs.
The infrastructure builds slowly so the outgoing bandwidth creeps up slowly as well. Because of the inefficiencies in any large network, it would cease to function if everyone were given symmetric speeds. The total bytes/sec for all the transmitters must be substantially less than the total bytes/sec for all the receivers or nothing will get through.
Really...it's FREE??!!
