They sound like opposites, and they are, but people often can’t say which they’re doing or why one is so much slower. Sorting it out explains a very common frustration.
Two words that sound like opposites and are, but people often cannot say which one they are doing at any given moment, or why one of them is so much slower than the other. It is a quick thing to sort out, and it explains a common frustration.
Downloading is receiving something from the internet onto your device. Uploading is sending something from your device out to the internet. Down is coming to you, up is going out.
Think of your internet connection like your relationship with the postal service. Downloading is receiving mail: a movie streaming to your TV, a web page loading, a photo someone sent you arriving on your phone. It all flows toward you.
Uploading is sending mail: posting a photo, attaching a file to an email, your face going out on a video call, backing up your files to the cloud. It flows away from you, out to somewhere else.
Most of the time you are doing both at once without noticing, but one direction usually dominates. Watching a video is almost all download. Being on a video call sends your camera out (upload) while their camera comes in (download) at the same time.
Download is mail arriving. Upload is mail you send. Most of what we do online is receiving, which is exactly how home internet is built.
Here is the frustration this explains. On most home internet, uploading is dramatically slower than downloading, and that is by design. Providers know that the average household receives far more than it sends, so the connection is built like a house with a big mail slot for incoming and a small one for outgoing. Wonderful for streaming, less wonderful the day you try to send a large video or back up years of photos and it crawls.
This is why your video call can look worse to the other person than they look to you. Your outgoing picture is squeezing through that small upload slot, while their incoming picture arrives through your big download one. Same call, two very different sized doors.
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