Unequal speeds on Internet source of growing frustration

NEW YORK — Blame the Internet's legacy systems if Jay Glatfelter falls asleep Thursday mornings.

Co-host of an online audio show about "Lost," Glatfelter must wait about 40 minutes to finish posting his program to the Internet in the hours after ABC's Wednesday night broadcast. If he were downloading it like any of his listeners do, the same file would take only a few minutes over his speedy cable modem.

"At 3 in the morning, that's really brutal," said Glatfelter, 21, who lives in Raleigh, N.C. "It's an extra 40 minutes and you want to go to sleep."

The information superhighway isn't truly equal in both directions. Cable and phone companies typically sell asymmetrical Internet services to households, reserving the bulk of the lanes for downloading movies and other files and leaving the shoulders at most for people to share, or upload, files with others.

The imbalance makes less sense as the Internet becomes truly interactive. Users are increasingly becoming contributors and not just consumers, sharing photos, video and, in Glatfelter's case, podcasts. In a nod to the trend of user-generated content, Time magazine recently named "You" — everyone who has contributed — as its Person of the Year.

It's a little-known fact because advertisements for cable and DSL services generally focus on download speeds. Glatfelter, like other Internet content providers, is stuck unless he shells out hundreds of dollars a month for business-grade services that provide equal speeds upstream and downstream.

YouTube's rapid rise in 2006 — and Google's November purchase of the video-sharing site for $1.76 billion — "clearly points to symmetric traffic as being important," said John Cioffi, a Stanford engineering professor and pioneer in DSL technology.

Furthermore, people also are increasingly sharing among themselves, rather than through central servers that normally absorb the upload pressures. In recent months, Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Time Warner's Warner Bros. and other movie studios began embracing the BitTorrent file-sharing system to more economically distribute online movies.

It's only a matter of time before people will want to retrieve digital media from home while vacationing at a beach house.

Yet the ability to upload still lags — in some cases, downloads are 10 to 15 times faster.

"The system is a hangover of the old mass-media days," said Paul Saffo, a technology analyst in Palo Alto, Calif. "Some consumers are uploading a tremendous amount of information and that's the thing the establishment just doesn't get."

Cable and phone providers insist they are keeping up with demand, in many cases increasing both upload and download speeds, but they say they haven't had a huge clamoring for symmetry.

"Speed has not been an issue for most of our customers, or we'd hear about them," said Mark Harrad, spokesman for Time Warner Cable.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said customers may indeed be sharing more files, but "the majority of their time is spent downloading. As needs change, we'll look at offerings that meet customers' needs, whether it's symmetric service or it's just higher upload speeds."

He said AT&T tripled its upload speeds within the past two years, but downloads remain four times faster for its middle-tier DSL service. The gap is wider for higher-priced plans.

Even Verizon Communications' superfast FiOS initiative brings download speeds 2.5 to 7.5 times faster than uploads.

The origins of the imbalance are technical. Too much uploading can interfere with download signals on DSL services, while cable TV providers must squeeze uploading within the broadcast spectrum below television's Channel 2.

But even as engineers overcome the limitations, it's unclear how much service providers will allocate to uploads. More bandwidth for sharing means less for television, video on demand and the like.

For many Internet users, the imbalance still synchs with their needs.

YouTube visitors, for instance, view more than 100 million video clips a day but upload only 65,000. Elsewhere, the few uploads that people do send tend to be small files — an e-mail attachment or text to a discussion board.

Furthermore, uploads aren't often time sensitive. Internet users can send photos and other items in the background, but want to watch the movie clip right away.

Americans can usually pay more if they need symmetric services, but many aren't even convinced they need high-speed service at all, said Maribel Lopez, a vice president with Forrester Research.