When owners evaluate internet infrastructure, the conversation always starts with the same number: download speed.

How fast can residents stream. How quickly do files load. Is it gigabit. Is it multigigabit.

Download speed is the nunber on the billboard. It’s what gets marketed at lease-up, what shows up in the amenity list, what prospects ask about on tours.

It’s also only half the story.

How residents actually use the internet

For most of the consumer internet’s history, optimizing for download was the right call. Traffic flowed one direction: server to device. Upload was an afterthought because residents weren’t sending much.

That stopped being true years ago. OpenVault’s most recent broadband report clocked upstream usage growing 21.7% year-over-year in 2025, more than double the rate of downstream growth.

Remote work is permanent. A single Facetime or Zoom call eats roughly 3 Mbps of upload, continuously, and a resident running back-to-back meetings is pushing data upstream for hours. Content creation has gone mainstream; YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, podcasts, all upload-heavy. Cloud sync runs in the background regularly across every phone, laptop, and tablet in the unit. Security cameras, video doorbells, and smart home devices stream upstream around the clock.

The household that downloads everything and uploads nothing stopped existing a long time ago. Residents feel the gap now, even if they can’t name it.

Why many networks get this wrong

Legacy cable networks run on DOCSIS, which allocates far more bandwidth down than up. A cable “gigabit” plan typically delivers 1 Gbps down and 35 to 50 Mbps up. Twenty-to-one, sometimes worse.

That was fine when residents mostly consumed. It’s not fine when they work, create, and collaborate.

A lot of managed Wi-Fi systems deployed in multifamily over the last several years inherited the same asymmetry. The marketing said “up to 1 Gbps” without mentioning the gigabit only flows one way. The result is a network that looks great on paper and frustrates residents in practice. Big broadband might have coax in your building, but that doesn’t mean you should use it…

Choppy audio on a client call. Frozen frames. Uploads that take four times longer than they should. That’s an upload problem. And because nobody markets upload speed, nobody can point their finger to it immediately. Residents just know the internet “doesn’t work right.”

No Asterisks

Symmetrical means the same speed both directions. 1 Gbps down, 1 Gbps up.

A connection is only as fast as its slowest direction. When upload chokes, everything tied to it suffers; the call freezes, the backup stalls, the camera drops a feed.

Internet Subway delivers symmetrical speeds at every tier. Every resident starts on 1 Gbps up and down, and can upgrade instantly, generally up to 8Gbps. No “up to” caveats, no asymmetric ceiling hidden in the fine print.

Download speed helps sell the lease. Upload speed keeps the resident.