It's not that copper providers would rather not give symmetrical speeds, there are physical limitations which prevent it. DOCSIS 3.1 has provisions to alleviate this limitation, but there are still large technical barriers to get the performance out of it.
For example, my ISP offers 60/5, 100/10, 200/20, 500/40, and 1000/60. Reason is channel bonding AND limited bandwidth within a coax cable, modulation techniques, and downstream vs upstream carriers. D3.0 used channel bonding which I'm sure you're all familiar with the modems listing 4x4 or 16x4 or 32x4 which are the channel bonds.
My ISP uses 16 bonded channels for DOCSIS 3 with 3 upstream carriers. DOCSIS 3.1 uses OFDM modulation to combine 16 channels into one block. They must still support the other 16 D3 bonded channels tho for the older modems on the network. It's a slow upgrade process getting customers to WANT to let you come in and replace equipment.
Our system will be launching a 4th upstream carrier, but the limitations are that it will be much more susceptible to noise, (loose, old, corroded, ect connections.) which can have a massive negative impact on everyone on that particular node.
Most Coax ISP networks in the US are HFC networks. Hybrid Fiber Coax networks.
Mind you, all these "channels" are 6MHz wide analog QAM 256 carriers, the upstream carriers are QAM64, due to the susceptibility of transient noise.
Just throwing this in as a technical response to try and explain it's ust not as easy as "wanting" to not offer symmetrical DL/UL speeds. It's a compromise with trying to use the available bandwidth most effectively. Remember they have to also have video streams on the additional 6MHz transport streams. Which are usually the ones from 400MHz up towards the 1GHz spectrum.
The asymmetric D/U is likely caused by ISPs not wanting to pay more for upload capacity, as in they gotta pay to who ever they are connected to for the speed or even amount they want to send out where as data flowing to them is probably "unlimited". Similar to: you don't pay the post/courier for receiving packages but you gotta pay them if you want to send any.
That's why we are seeing so much of the 100/10 nonsense connections. Sure it works for the average joe who only browses web but if you're a content creator it's a nightmare. Internally the ISP networks don't really care and are likely symmetric as is most consumer networking equipment. It's only higher up where the networks differ and you start to pay for "slots" to send data. The ISPs gotta be connected somewhere right and those are yet another networking companies who operate large networks for profit, connecting countries, having country wide networks, etc. Where as ISP only often does the last mile and aggregating these end users to a small number of lines.
30/30, last time I checked my ISP was offering something around 50/10 at same price... now I can't even search my address to see the offerings as the search results are empty for my location... other locations in town offering optic... 40/10, 100/100 for negligible more... and 250/150 for a little more. Problem is... the whole house is connected via 200/200 antenna so... yeah good luck getting 100/100 from them I bet as they would have to upgrade the antenna and there certainly wasn't any construction in recent years laying down optic cables around. Even elsewhere I'm curious how they offer optic connection in a house, maybe they finally bought optic from some telco to connect the town or they are simply trying to offer higher speed to fill in their wireless town-town capacity. As to upgrading the 200/200 house antenna, yeah well I'm not sure how many if even any people in here really care to use internet much for them to be worth it to upgrade this over $6k antenna to a higher speed probably more expensive model.
Must be nice to live in areas where optic connections were done, the town/city cares about it's residents and tries to improve offered services in reliability and speed. Thing is most places don't have optic connections and someone would have to connect the towns, then rip up the whole town's tarmac and lay cables into ground in each street to each house... oh yeah, not cheap as you can imagine.
Maybe I will go ask my ISP in person one day, see what is going on in this town with internet speed from them and if it's gonna stay as nowdays kind of behind and slow with wonky reliability. The only plus is it doesn't cost a fortune.
DSL and what not... dead, no one should be using these telco services anymore but sometimes you don't have a choice as no one wants to invest in small towns to offer better competitive services. US is far from the only country having problems with building infrastructure for up to date technologies and services. Tons of money gets poured into mobile devices/services because they also love to charge you outrageous fees for it on a monthly basis and is where the rip off telco has moved to. Even then getting good data speeds on mobile largely depends on location as again only most populated and flat terrain areas get good signal.
Another rubbish ISPs love to do is connect you to their network and not to internet really as in you gotta pay extra, and sometimes that extra is quite large monthly fee compared to what your monthly fee is for the connection itself, to get a public static IP accessible from internet.
Upload bandwidth is a joke. Currently running 200/10. Makes uploading videos a chore. Also notice the lack of upload when a game like Skyrim uploads its save data.
If I could get a solid 200/100+ I'd have to set up a nice home server.
I know your in the EU, but in response to your first sentence see the above response.
Sorry about any formatting, the new site platform sucks for people that don't know the BB code formatting as a second language, or off the top of the head.