If your download is 200 Mbps but upload is only 20, don't panic — for most home connections that's completely normal. It's called an asymmetric connection, and it's by design.
Check your upload speed →Free · No signup · ~10 secondsInternet providers give you far more download capacity than upload because of how people use the internet. You spend most of your time pulling data in — streaming, browsing, downloading — and much less sending data out. So providers split the line to favour download, which makes everyday browsing feel fast.
A low upload number is only an issue if it affects what you do:
If your calls are fine and pages load fast, your upload is doing its job.
Run a speed test to see your real upload number and the provider you're on. If it's far below your plan, try a wired connection first, then contact your provider.
Asymmetry isn't a policy decision your provider made to annoy you. It's built into how each technology divides the capacity it has.
| Connection | Typical down:up |
|---|---|
| Full fibre (FTTH) | 1:1 |
| Cable (DOCSIS 3.1) | 10:1 to 25:1 |
| VDSL / fibre-to-cabinet | 5:1 to 10:1 |
| ADSL | 10:1 to 20:1 |
| 5G mobile | 5:1 to 15:1 |
| Satellite | 10:1 or worse |
On cable, the coaxial line carries a fixed range of radio frequencies, and only a narrow slice at the bottom is assigned to upstream. It is a spectrum allocation decision made decades ago, when almost all home traffic flowed one way. Copper phone lines are asymmetric for a related reason: upstream and downstream share a cable bundle, and crosstalk between neighbouring lines limits how much upstream can be pushed.
Fibre has no such constraint, which is why full-fibre plans are often symmetric. If your upload is dramatically lower than your download, that ratio is telling you which technology reaches your building.
Run a test and divide download by upload. If the ratio roughly matches the table, your connection is behaving as designed and no amount of calling support will change it. If the ratio is far worse — a cable line reading 40:1, say — something is wrong, and that's worth reporting.
Note what isn't on that list: normal browsing, streaming video, and playing online games. Those are download and latency, and a low upload figure doesn't touch them.
Upload measurement breaks more often than download measurement, and results vary more between speed tests. The reason is that browsers give much weaker visibility into outgoing data than incoming, so many tests fall back to timing whole completed transfers — which reads as 0 or wildly wrong when the uplink is slow enough that nothing finishes inside the window.
We rebuilt our upload measurement twice for exactly this reason. If you want the details, we published them in how we measure.