The number your internet package is not advertising

Every internet package in Kenya is advertised on one number, and it is the download figure. It is the easiest number to market because it is the one that gets large quickly, and it is genuinely the right number to look at if what you do all day is read pages and watch video. For a growing share of what people actually do online, it is the wrong number entirely.

Upload is what your connection sends outward. A video call sends your camera feed continuously. A CCTV system configured for remote viewing sends footage out of the building the whole time it is recording. Cloud backup, file sharing, a live stream from a church service, a hosted phone system - all of them are upload. When a call freezes at your end while the other person keeps moving, that is almost always upload, not download.

The reason this matters is that many packages are asymmetric by design, and the asymmetry can be severe. A connection advertised on a large download figure can carry an upload allowance a small fraction of that size. On a household where one person is on a video call, that is fine. Add a second call, a camera system uploading, and someone backing up a phone, and the upload path saturates while the download figure on the bill remains completely untouched.

This is also why "the internet is slow" is such an unhelpful complaint to act on. The download test everyone runs first will usually come back fine, because the download path is not the one under pressure. The test worth running is the upload figure, taken while the things that normally run are actually running - not at six in the morning when the office is empty.

Before you upgrade, work out what you are sending rather than what you are receiving. Count the concurrent video calls, the cameras configured for remote access, and whether anything backs up to the cloud during working hours. That list produces a sustained upload requirement, and a package sized against it will fix complaints that a larger download figure would not have touched.

If you are not sure what your site is actually sending, that is a reasonable thing to ask an engineer to measure rather than estimate. It is a short piece of work, and it regularly saves businesses from buying a larger package to solve a problem the larger package does not address.