Swimming Upstream

If there's one thing that ISPs - and the country's only sizable cableco - could do to give themselves an advantage, it's to sort out upload speeds.

A typical down connection of 2Mbps (or even 8Mbps) has 256Kbps or 512Kbps upstream. This means that loading photos and videos takes forever. Worse still, it interferes badly with your downstream connection, turning it into sludge akin to a 28.8 connection for those of you old enough to remember... The problem to date has been that the additional upstream bandwidth is used by voice calls, but VoIP could be utilised instead.

So, Virgin/Sky/TalkTalk/Orange/Tiscali, how about doing a deal with Flickr and YouTube and bundling a synchronous connection which has the same amount of bandwidth up and down? I know that I'd switch to a provider offering this.

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