Upload Speeds Matter: Why Cable and DSL Home Internet Speeds are Outdated.

Customers of the local cable and telephone companies that don’t have fiber to the home available and left with no better option for upload speed greater than 20 Mbps are finding out that those speeds just aren’t good enough. Why? Primarily because cloud-based security cameras can chew up 6 to 20 Mbps per camera. 10 years ago, if you had asked me whether or not people would be comfortable uploading their security camera video to a company somewhere in the cloud for storage, I’d have been doubtful. But today, with the prevalence of Ring doorbell cameras and others like the Netgear Arlo outdoor cameras, we appear to have gotten over our trust issues with third parties having access to our cameras. Applications like FaceTime from Apple also use upload bandwidth and as cameras get more powerful, more and more bandwidth will be needed. A single 4K camera running at 15 fps, or frames per second (movies use 24 fps), can use between 15 and 20 Mbps. This extra resolution means that the camera will be able to better detect motion and record better footage both day and night and 8k is right around the corner which will require between 80 and 100 Mbps.

Next on the horizon for home security will be advanced cloud-based video analytics for alerting with home security cameras. Don’t want to be alerted when the camera sees you pull into your own driveway? Want an alert when the brown UPS truck delivers a package? Tired of alerts from your dog, cat, bird or spider deciding to make an appearance on your camera? Want to record the license plates of cars pulling into your driveway? All of this is possible today but the horsepower required to do these analytics is expensive and if you want these features, unless you’re a techie, these services will only be available as a cloud service. Which means that every video stream you send will chew up more and more of that measly 20 Mbps.

For farm businesses, those with great upload speeds will have significant advantages over those without. Aerial surveys of farm acreage can detect patches of land that need watering, or fertilizer or insect remediation but the ability to process that data and react quickly is key. This means that video from drones will need to be uploaded to a cloud service, processed, and the results returned to the farmer within a few hours. Some of these files are upwards of 60 gigabytes and likely to grow as cameras improve. Over a 20 Mbps connection, a transfer of this size would take 8 hours, but most farms around here don’t have anywhere near 20 Mbps. Add to that the time to process the video and get the results back to the farmer and it could be over 24 hours before the issue can be remediated.

Folks working from home have known for years that these upload speeds were barely sufficient. Anyone that’s ever tried uploading a video to Youtube over cable or DSL knows that it can take an eternity. Video conferences are often slow and choppy due to the unreliable latency (jitter) of the connections.

Champions of the free-market telecommunications fairy tail that believe that our current cable and telephone monopolies will solve this upload speed bottleneck are fooling themselves. Except in areas dense enough for a provider to overbuild the local cable company with a fiber to the home network, the cable company has no incentive to increase these upload speeds. To do so over their existing cable(DOCSIS) networks would require them to cut channels from their lineup; channels that generate ad revenue. Increasing upload speeds when there is no financial pressure from competition likely means that they’d rather keep the income-generating channels over the non-revenue generating option of increasing upload speeds.

Fiber to the home is the future and any tax dollars spent subsidizing cable, DSL or wireless technologies is wasteful and means that those companies will be coming back to the well for more tax dollars when those technologies are no longer good enough. Rural communities without fiber to the home will (and are) become retirement destinations for digital Luddites while those with fiber become vibrant, thriving atmospheres that attract young, possibly displaced workers seeking a rural lifestyle and lower cost of living where they can work from home and raise a family and not have to worry about whether or not they have enough bandwidth.