It’s an all-too-familiar experience: you get the shiny new internet plan, but for some reason its performance is underwhelming. Your first thought may be “they’re not providing the speeds they advertised!” While that’s sometimes the case, other times it’s only half right. With many plans, the speed advertised is the download speed—the upload speed is much slower. And despite what some providers may want you to think, upload speed is just as important.

We’re always uploading

Think of the internet as a “two-way street.” One direction is upload, and the other download. Now while lots of what we do online relies on downloading (streaming a movie, loading your social media feed), we’re always uploading as well. Some of these are just tiny bits of data—for example, going through your Netflix menu requires uploads of your inputs. However, some important things we do daily can be seriously hampered by slow upload speeds. Here are just three examples!

Video Calling

In the past few years, video calling has become a big part of our lives. These days the quality is incredible—but only if you both have great upload speeds! When you’ve got a slow upload rate, the person on the other end will experience choppy video and garbled speech. On some platforms, the conversation will simply be paused and eventually dropped. Either way, slow upload speeds are the enemy of enjoying a great video call.

Storing in the cloud

What used to be a mysterious term is now easily recognizable to most of us. Rather than paying for expensive external hard drives or memory cards, we now store much of our work, study material, and media like pictures or video on online servers or “in the cloud.” But our stuff has to get there somehow, and that “how” is by uploading. Slow upload speeds lower our productivity and slow down our devices. But that’s not all—the faster and more reliably we can upload, the more secure our sensitive data is.

Gaming

This may come as a surprise to some of us, but upload performance is arguably more important than that of download when it comes to gaming. The online games with the most impressive graphics can get by with reasonable download speeds.  But for responsive gameplay, you need fast upload speeds and low ping (back-and-forth communication time). 

Get a better internet experience with Ting

At Ting, we’re all about providing the best all-round internet experience. That means a symmetrical fiber connection with download and upload speeds of up to 2 gigabits. Unlike many providers that use hybrid cable and fiber hookups, our Fiber to the Home (FTTH) connection uses the speed and reliability of fiber all the way to your modem. And since your experience with your provider goes beyond your connection, we offer 24/7 customer support, never lock you into a contract, and offer one forever-fair price with no hidden fees. Check your address to see if the best internet service around is available is in your area.