It's a business philosophy, not a technical limitation. And it's not just Cox. Most ISPs assume that residential customers are primarily consuming content, which requires a lot of downstream bandwidth but not much upstream bandwidth. Video conference requires more upstream bandwidth, but even 35 Mbps would theoretically be enough for 10 or more simultaneous HD Zoom meetings.
Cloud backups are probably the best example of where a lot of upstream bandwidth would be very useful. Uploading videos to YouTube is the other example. Most other uses of upstream bandwidth (seeding torrents, multi-client streaming, running servers) are TOS violations for residential internet so the ISPs don't see any reason to provide bandwidth for those use cases. Not saying I agree with it. I wish I could get symmetric gigabit and I know the technology allows for much more than 35 Mbps, but I understand why Cox isn't offering faster upstream speeds.
Just as an FYI, torrents are NOT against TOS. It's what's in a given torrent that make it's use legal or not.
I guess that depends on how you interpret 12(c)(x) of the TOS: "using automated connections that allow web broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections or peer-to-peer file sharing". Does BitTorrent automatically connect to another machine to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing? It's one of those rules they can enforce when they want to and ignore when they want to. Point being, they can use it as a justification for why they don't need to provide very much upstream bandwidth.
