I am curious. Is there any technical reason why you cant have the same high up/down speed? Is it more expensive?
If Google provides a service with a high upload speed, I can see myself hosting my own server from home. Crappy upload speed is the only thing stopping me from hosting servers myself from my home line.
PON FTTH is a shared medium typically being split 32 or 64 ways so there is some over subscription to consider but for the most part there are no major technical limitations to offering symmetrical speeds. For cable ISPs there are a few problems: The amount usable of return/upstream spectrum on a cable plant is traditionally much lower than the amount of forward/downstream DOCSIS bandwidth. Until DOCSIS 3 there was no cost effective way to utilize all of the available spectrum anyway. DOCSIS 3 introduces upstream channel bonding and pushes forward with SCDMA modulation which, in theory, makes the lower/noisier spectrum under 20Mhz usable. Some cable ISPs are planning for more return spectrum space (50-75Mhz) which also solves the problem. The big hardware players in that space are lagging behind a bit on upstream bonding but it should be available soon. (it's already out there in limited deployments)
For the general well being of the Internet I think any provider offering 1Gb/sec upload speeds to residential users needs to do deep packet inspection or employ some other method to protect against malware driven attacks. You can do some real harm with 1Gb/sec. DPI would probably be preferred since it could snoop out known attacks and allow the customer to utilize their upstream speeds legitimately. A blanket QoS policy for high usage is easier but has some obvious downsides. Probably not a bad idea at the 50-100Mbit/sec range either. There's too much malware out there to be oblivious to the risks.
That would obviously depend on many, many things, but when I was in Japan I regularly uploaded at 60+Mb/s on a 100Mb connection, which basically maxed out my CPU. I assume that, given reasonable contention ratios, you'd be able to upload at a good proportion of the 1Gbps to any peer, over any pipe, able to accept it. I wouldn't count on being able to get anything like that over an international link but to your friend in the next suburb, sure.
If Google provides a service with a high upload speed, I can see myself hosting my own server from home. Crappy upload speed is the only thing stopping me from hosting servers myself from my home line.