8. 1. 2025 | ← Back to blog
When choosing an internet tariff, most people focus on one figure: download speed. Providers know this well. That is why they advertise 500 Mb/s or 1 Gb/s in large type and list upload speeds in small print somewhere in the terms and conditions. Yet for many businesses and households, it is precisely the upload that determines whether the internet works effectively or becomes a source of frustration.
Asymmetric connections have different speeds for incoming and outgoing data. A typical example is a cable tariff with 200 Mb/s download and 20 Mb/s upload. Download is ten times faster than upload. For a household that primarily streams films and browses the web, this may not be an issue: both activities are almost entirely inbound traffic.
Symmetrical connection has identical values for both directions. The 500 Mb/s symmetrical tariff means 500 Mb/s for both download and upload, without compromises or hidden limitations.
Optical fibre is inherently symmetrical. There is no physical reason why a light signal should travel faster in one direction than the other. Asymmetry in cable and DSL connections is a deliberate decision by operators to more efficiently utilise the limited capacity of shared media.
Cloud backups. Daily backup of company data, whether to Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud or any other storage, is pure upload. A company with 20 computers can generate tens of gigabytes of new or changed data daily. If you have only 20 Mb/s upload available, transferring 50 GB takes over five hours. The backup will not finish by morning, it will overlap with working hours and slow down all other traffic.
Videoconferencing. Teams, Zoom or Meet send your video and audio to other participants. That is upload. A group call with five participants and a shared screen may require 8-12 Mb/s upload for just one user. If you have ten people in the office on calls at once, you need over 100 Mb/s upload. With an asymmetric tariff this simply won't work.
File sharing and remote collaboration. A graphic designer sending materials to a client, an engineer uploading drawings to SharePoint, a developer pushing code to a remote repository, all are uploads. Waiting for files to send is a daily loss of productivity that adds up to hours in the annual balance sheet.
Corporate VPN and remote access. The VPN tunnel operates in both directions, but a slow upload on the user's side will also slow down the apparent download over the VPN. Remote work on a company server, access to an ERP or accounting system, all pass through this bottleneck of limited upload.
Own servers and applications. A company operating its own web server, mail server or externally accessible application requires absolutely symmetrical upload. A server responding to internet requests constantly sends data, and if it lacks sufficient upload capacity, it responds slowly or not at all.
Mobile networks (4G, 5G) are designed for the consumer market, primarily for downloading content. Frequency bands are allocated asymmetrically, with the majority of capacity dedicated to download. In practice, this means that even a decent 5G tariff offering 200 Mb/s download will provide an upload speed in the range of 30-50 Mb/s. And this is only under optimal conditions, with a weak signal, the result will be even worse.
Optical fibre has no such limitation. Our network in Prague 1 offers symmetric tariffs from 100 Mb/s to 2 000 Mb/s, always the same speed in both directions, guaranteed by contract.
The answer is simple: for everyone who actively uses the internet, not just consumes it. Today this includes most businesses, but an increasing number of households as well.
Companies that back up data, operate remote access or have employees on video conferences should not even consider an asymmetric tariff. The costs of lost productivity will quickly exceed the price of a better connection.
How a symmetric connection can specifically improve your business operations is described on the page Internet and IT for businessesIf you wish to check availability and terms for your address, please contact us.
We provide fast and stable internet, fair prices and reliable communication. You can sleep soundly.