Altice USA has confirmed plans to reduce the uplink speeds of its cable broadband tiers by as much as 86%, a baffling move the cable operator explains is intended to put its high-speed internet service more in line with its competitors. 

Starting July 12, new customers who sign up for Altice USA’s least expensive tier, Optimum 100, which currently offers 100 megabit-per-second downstream and 35 Mbps upstream speeds, will see upstream bandwidth reduced to 5 Mbps, with no reduction in the price of the service. The company’s 200 Mbps downstream service will see its 35 Mbps upstream speed cut to 10 Mbps. The 300 Mbps will have its current 35 Mbps speeds trimmed to just 20 Mbps. And the Optimum 400 plan will go from a 40 Mbps uplink speed to 20 Mbps. 

The cable operator’s most premium 1-gig tier will see uplink speeds drop from 50 Mbps to 35 Mbps. 

Download speeds will remain the same. The change will only apply to new customers, but existing Altice USA subscribers will be exposed if they change their tiers. 

Altice USA reps insist the higher upstream speeds, relied on so much during a pandemic year of home office and home schooling, are not over-taxing its networks. 

Rather, a rep told Ars Technica that the reductions put Altice USA "in line with other ISPs and aligned with the industry.”

Company reps also reminded Fierce Telecom that Altice USA’s fiber-to-the-home network, which currently serves 1 million customers, does offer symmetrical internet speeds. The speed changes only affect users of Altice USA’s hybrid-fiber/coaxial network. The company had about 4.3 million total broadband customers at the end of Q1 2021. 

Jeff Heynen, VP of Broadband Access and Home Networking at Dell’Oro Group, told Fierce Telecom that “the only reason to do this is to push customers who absolutely need the higher upload speeds into more expensive bandwidth tiers."

“This is exactly what other cable operators have done—limit upload speeds and then push customers who need 20 Mbps-plus uploads to their more expensive tiers,” he said.

Yes, we transacted an unprecedented amount of 1s and 0s amid the pandemic, not just downstream for watching Netflix, but also upstream, letting bosses and teachers see our happy faces on Zoom cameras. 

OpenVault, a Hoboken, N.J. company that consults broadband suppliers on how they can optimize and monetize their networks, continues to release data points highlighting the specifics of this dramatic usage increase

U.S. broadband consumers increased their upstream usage by 63% from December 2019 to December 2020, from an average of 19 gigabytes a month to 31 GB. 

Still not totally blown way? OK, here's more.

Between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., U.S. broadband users saw upstream consumption increase from 5.25 GB to 10.42 GB over the same one year span. 

That 98.5% increase compared to 51.74% growth for downstream traffic, from 91.9 GB to 139.45 GB. 

The rate of growth increase for upstream traffic was 350% over historic rates, OpenVault said. 

Notably, 1% of the U.S. broadband using population uses 30% of the upstream traffic, and 5% of these super users consume 50% of upstream data. 

OpenVault also said that during peak hours, “operators routinely face situations in which a single subscriber accounts for more than 80% of available upstream capacity."

A White House official told the Des Moines Register Saturday that the President will outline new steps to increase access to high-speed broadband when he visits Cedar Falls, Iowa, Jan, 14, which has a 1-Gigabit broadband network provided by Cedar Fall Utilities.

The speech will come only a few days before the President is expected to talk once again in his State of the Union (SOTU) speech (Jann.20) about the importance of high-speed broadband deployment and adoption—it has been a theme in recent SOTU's, as well as cybersecurity and privacy online.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, who was a tech policy adviser to candidate Obama and President Obama, has already been doing some spadework on that effort, signaling last week that the FCC wanted to make 25 Mbps (downstream) broadband the new definition of high speed and had concluded that was not being delivered to all Americans in a timely fashion.

The FCC has also made speed a priority in the FCC administered E-rate program for underwriting high-speed broadband to schools and libraries. In last year's State of the Union, the President focused on connecting more schools to high-speed broadband.

Notable for its absence during the SOTU last year was any mention of the state of the network neutrality rules, which the President supported as both candidate and President. But the President has arguable made up for that since then by late last year coming out strongly for Title II reclassification of Internet Access under Title II, arguing that without it ISP's would be able to restrict access.