There’s a lot to love about our FiberFAST Internet, but one of its most significant advantages isn’t always well understood – symmetrical speeds. Check out the blog article and video to learn more.
What are symmetrical speeds and why are they important?
In a nutshell, “symmetrical speeds” means that your download bandwidth and upload bandwidth are the same. So, for example, on our fastest Gig plan, you get 1,000 Mbps up and 1,000 Mbps down. On the other hand, the nation’s biggest broadband provider only offers 35 Mbps upload on their Gigabit plan.
Providers typically advertise their download speeds, and it’s easy to see why. Most devices and applications are pulling things down from the Internet to support your applications and devices. Installing and running apps and games, streaming movies and music, surfing the Internet — all these things depend on good download speeds to draw information online to your device.
Some things, though, require pushing data up to the Internet.
Have you ever sat and waited … and waited … for a batch of photos to upload to a shared folder? Have you ever struggled through a meeting via video conferencing when your boss or customer is a glitchy, garbled mess? Slow upload speed was likely to blame.
If you’re working or going to school from home or sharing files and photos, upload speeds are critical. They boost video conferencing quality, reduce the time to upload files and improve cloud-based applications like Google Classroom and backup services like Dropbox, iCloud and Google Drive. Upload speeds are involved whenever you share or send information over the Internet or use a cloud-based application. The faster the upload speeds, the less time it takes to transmit that data.
Upload speeds are an essential part of your smart home security.
Take, for example, cloud-based technology like wireless smart home security cameras. They’re small, capable of 4K resolution, inexpensive, easy to set up, and quickly becoming ubiquitous — but they’re also upload speed hogs. A popular feature of these devices is the ability to stream what they capture so you can watch while you’re away from home, which requires (you guessed it!) upload speeds. The most popular brands on the market (Arlo, Ring, Nest, Blink) all have hefty minimum upload speed requirements, and that’s just for standard definition (SD) streaming. Those requirements only increase if you want to stream a camera feed in high definition (HD) or 4K.
With Red River’s FiberFAST Internet, even our Starter 250 Mbps service will easily handle the requirements for your smart home security camera. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for other broadband provider plans that offer 25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up, 100 Mbps down/5 Mbps up, and 200 Mbps down/5 Mbps up. That barely covers the minimum upload speed requirement for SD streaming no matter what wireless smart home security camera you choose. And forget about HD quality video.
Symmetrical is just better.
That’s the beautiful thing about symmetrical speeds – they are transparent and reliable. And with Red River’s FiberFAST Managed WiFi system, you can take advantage of the top speeds – download and upload – all throughout your home.
Get in touch with our super-friendly Customer Experience team for faster file sharing, better video conferencing, online gaming, and streaming.