Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not credible to suppose that Comcast's network is built around equal exchange of traffic. The broadband connections they provide are wildly asymmetrical, often by an order of magnitude. And then there's this: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/bittor... "[W]hen we ask [ISPs] if we too would qualify for no-fee interconnect if we changed our service to upload as much data as we download—thus fil…
> It's not credible to suppose that Comcast's network is built around equal exchange of traffic. The broadband connections they provide are wildly asymmetrical, often by an order of magnitude. That's because around the time Comcast was building up their networks customer demand was wildly asymmetrical. People simply download far more than they upload and Comcast wisely dedicated more of it's bandwidth to downloads.
At the time all cable companies were were building up their data network, they were building that network over top of their existing video distribution network. That network was designed [ages prior to this point] to have tiny, tiny, upstream channels for use by system control and maintenance devices, and huge downstream channels to shove 100+ analog TV channels. Because it would have cost a metric shitload to replace all of that hardware, the cable companies were forced to give their data subscribers pretty large downstream links and relatively meager upstream links.[0]
Frankly, the nerds of the day (remember, this is the mid-to-late 1990's) would all have been running home servers, and would have been demanding a symmetric connection so that they would have a substantially cheaper alternative to ISDN.
(Note that nerds that remember those days consider asymmetric home Internet connections to have been more harmful than the Eternal September.)
[0] Note that this property is pretty meaningless in an HFC network where the cable company could run fiber directly to the home, but chooses not to. [See also ATT U-Verse.]