The upload you are not buying

The British broadband advert is a download document. It always was. Television arrived at the house; the house did not broadcast back. Then the spare room became an office, the camera went on, the backup went to a datacentre in Dublin, and the second number on the spec sheet started to matter. Many people still do not look at it.

Who actually feels a weak upload

• Two people on video calls at once, plus a child streaming.
• Anyone uploading raw photos, CAD, or a day’s recordings.
• Cloud backup that never seems to finish by morning.
• Gamers who were sold ping as a lifestyle and got a cable upload instead.

If the camera freezes, it is rarely because the download is shy.

Set a minimum upload the way you already set a minimum download. Put it in preferences. Then look at the column. The poster will not do this work for you.

Set an upload floor the way you set a download floor

If two people take calls, write “40 Mbps up” on a note and refuse to shop below it. If you also backup a terabyte overnight, write a bigger number. Then look at the column. Cable gigabit with ~50 Mbps up can still be the right buy for a download-heavy house. It is the wrong buy for a house that sends.

What ranking does with this

Home-working and gaming preferences lift products with stronger upload. A generic “speed” preference still leans on download, because that is how most people still shop. We will not pretend a 1 Gbps / 50 Mbps cable product is the same as a 900 / 900 alt-net. The catalogue carries both numbers. Use them.