[vtthrowaway2519]

"Comcast era" is not accurate, nor is the limitation "made up". ADSL service in fact has been the best option for a lot of us in Vermont and other rural areas, and while DSL can be symmetric as a technology it gets hard in spread out deployments to keep up signal. There are real tradeoffs to make when total bandwidth (in the signal sense) is pretty limited, trying to get pushed over old copper.

Going forward yes, it'd be nice to see symmetric speeds get emphasized more and hopefully made standard for any future targets. Widely deployed decent symmetric links would open up a lot of new options for decentralization, though it's probably worth being mindful of the negative effect it could have in terms of botnets if some thought isn't put into it. And a mere THREE down is definitely pretty absurd at this point, some friends on 25 Mbps ADSL still get 10 Mbps up and an office that is close enough to the provider to get 50 Mbps down is at ~24 up. But having some asymmetry at all doesn't seem inherently unfair yet? Between wisps/starlink/fiber maybe symmetric can be the goal next definition update.