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Reasons for asymmetry
The Net was meant in the first place to be symmetrical. The "design" you're talking about was what the carriers deployed because they could not imagine consumers becoming producers. They could not comprehend markets like the one for photography today, where the only consumption is of means for production. Today, if I want to put 200 photos in my Flickr collection, or worse, if I want to send a multi-gigabyte video file to Google Video, I can't even do it easily over my "business" broadband connection, which costs me $109/month and provides only 300kb of upstream bandwidth. So I go down to a Starbucks, where there's typically a T-1 in every store. This is not a good thing. Worse, it's a clueless thing, six years into the new millenium, for carriers who could be making a lot more money if they realized the gold mines sitting in the households they hold captive for Hollywood fare that still hasn't come through like everybody in that business imagined, back in '95 or whenever.
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