Sacrifice download for upload?

[Pawned]

Hi, I'm upgrading to 20meg, it's coming sometime today between 1pm and 6pm, I understand that the speeds I will get should be 20meg download and 1meg upload, so I have a question for you, would it be possible for virgin to take away some of my download speed and put more speed onto my upload?

For instance they could take 10meg off of the upload and add it onto the upload leaving me with a 10meg download and 11meg upload, this would be great if they could as I am constantly downloading stuff and then uploading it to my game servers, the downloading atm (I'm on 10meg) takes just a few seconds for most of the stuff I download, but sometimes I add a bunch of new maps to my css server which is sometimes 100+mb and it takes me a long long time to upload it, so if I had 10meg on my upload it'd be a lot faster and save me a lot of time :).

TL;DR version: If I phone virgin can I get more upload speed for less download speed?

[Sephiroth]

No - it's not possible. The infrastructure and DOCSIS regime don't work in the way you suggest.

To understand the network you might wish to read this:

http://rwatsh.blogspot.com/2007/04/understanding-cable-broadband.html

[Pawned]

Ok I had a quick read of that link, so Virgin use ADSL rather than cable? Because on the comparison of cable and ADSL it states that the upload speed of cable can be up to 30meg but is normally limited by the isp.
But then you say it uses that DOCSIS thing, which under that says it can do upto 10meg.

[Sephiroth]

It's a lot to take in. VM cable broadband is a Hybrid Fibre Coaxial network. There's plenty of copper in various places including your house.

DOCSIS allows very much larger upstream speeds than the 750Kb you'll be maxing. That is because within their current DOCSIS implementation, VM have allocated a certain bandwidth to be available at a certain modulation allowing a certain upstream speed. They've given their capacity to downstream rather than taking care of reasonable upstream capacity.

So far as I know, VM intend dealing with this in due course and are running trials (search the forum and you'll see what's going on) of their proposed solution.

In the meantime, it's 20 meg max down and .75 meg max up.

You'll need to read the link site thoroughly to gain a glimmer of understanding!

[Pawned]

Alright, thanks for the info Seph ;).