On a complete tangent, what's with the discrepancy between the down and up speeds you're given? Surely if you need 100 Mbps down, you need more than 5 Mbps up? Is this a standard thing in the States?
The precedent was set back in the analog modem days, when ISP modem banks connected to the POTS network using
digital lines, typically T1s (1.54 Mbps). Those were split up into twenty-four 56K channels (64K minus overhead), thus '56K modem'.
However, at the end-user's location the modem connected to the POTS network using an
analog line (Plain Old Telephone Service, complete with dial tone and occasional static) and was only capable of around 33Kbps, if memory serves. This asymmetry (56K down, 33K up) was deemed acceptable since most people
consumed Internet data rather than
publish it. They'd send out lightweight web requests but received (relatively) heavy web pages. The same is generally true today, although the data size has been scaled up.
DSL technology expanded upon modem speeds, but still carried over some of the same traffic asymmetry quirks. That brought us to around 20Mbps using something like AT&T's Uverse service.
As for why cable service is asymmetric, someone else will have to answer that. I've actually never had it myself. And fiber service should not have any built-in asymmetries at all, but that's a rare thing in the God-blessed U.S. of A. We're too stoopid here to deserve widespread fiber deployment (even though we invented the technology in the first place).
