A lot has been said about the state of broadband in this country recently, but it’s surprising how many people (including me) tend to gloss over an entire half of the equation: upload speeds. Download speeds are the sexy number, they’re bigger, they’re faster, people use them more and can better relate to them. However the Internet is becoming more and more about user-created content, this means one thing: uploading.

Verizon today announced the launch of a new FiOS service that offers “super-fast symmetrical speeds” – 20 Mbps downloads AND 20 Mbps uploads! We have right to be skeptical of this as we’re always hearing about new breakthroughs in transfer speeds and data-moving technology, but they’re seemingly always in limited tests (limited meaning one person who is probably an employee of the developing company). According to Verizon however this symmetrical FiOS broadband will be rolling out on a “mass scale” starting in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, then moving into 13 other states very soon.

For anyone who has ever done a massive bulk upload to Flickr, or is a loyal YouTube creator, this is great news. There will be no more sitting around waiting for an hour as my pictures upload – an amount of data that would take seconds to download – now they will upload in seconds too. Another huge winner: online gaming.

This is definitely progress for American broadband – we’ll see how long it takes to roll out on a massive scale…