Yeah, generally you only get a synchronous connection with stuff like fiber. ADSL and cable are typically heavily weighted toward download speeds. Honestly, that's perfectly fine. The two do need to scale with each other (every time you download a packet on an error-checking protocol, your system has to acknowledge to the server that it received the packet) but even with that in mind they still leave you enough bandwidth to host a 4K60 stream if you wanted to.
I was initially a little surprised that my existing modem was able to support the higher speeds without an issue, but that was mostly me forgetting how high the speed cap on DOCSIS 3.0 is (specifically: 1000/200). Speaking of which, protip: always buy your own cable modem. The ones you purchase are almost always better than the ones the cable companies lease you, and they usually pay for themselves very quickly (with a $10/mo rental fee, my modem paid for itself in 13 months). DOCSIS is a standard dictating how all modems bridge the cable connection with Ethernet, and since the cable provider pushes out a configuration file to the modem upon registration they're all basically plug-and-play.
As far as residential speeds go, yeah. I like. I wouldn't say I was quite as cynical as you, likely because I kept my ear to the ground regarding disruptive third-party fiber providers (I'd say we have them to thank more than anyone else for the uptick in speeds), but I definitely wasn't expecting 400Mbps+ this soon in my area. I was expecting 200Mbps service to be added, but instead they made 200Mbps the
minimum speed that they provide nationwide, while offering the next highest tier (which was bumped from 300->400Mbps) as a premium option.
It is fun to consider that the maximum connection speed in my area less than 20 years ago was 56kbps, however. I don't miss those days at all. That being said, things still aren't as fast as they could be, given the rather cavalier attitude that a lot of web designers have toward download sizes (Google's front page, despite its visual simplicity, is up to a whopping 1.5MB worth of various assets, or ~800KB compressed) and the fact that modern web browsers are basically operating systems. We've gone from waiting for our connections to waiting for an increasingly complex scripting engine to churn through ECMAScript while an equally complex renderer arranges the document in a particular way, using a complex set of rules.
Okay, fine, I guess I'm a little cynical. I'm just cynical about a different aspect of the technology stack.
