It was interesting to see one of the commenters mention Fort Collins Connexion.

I've mentioned them a few times on HN with lots of other locals chiming in, but that service was incredible. I was very sad when I moved to an older apartment complex that refused to allow the buildup and had to go back to Comcast for a year before I moved away. Comcast offered 1.2Gb/s down, which was real, but the second anyone did a small upload, the entire network bogged down to actually unusable speeds (read: HN wouldn't load at all).

Cheaper and significantly better service from the municipal ISP than mega-corp.

That sounds like bufferbloat[1]. You can usually address that by using a router that supports active queue management, but it's a little esoteric. Newer versions of DOCSIS also specify support for simple active queue management on the modem, and I think this has become a little bit better in recent years. I used to have Comcast/Xfinity service and they didn't do terribly with regard to bufferbloat. They didn't do well, either, but it used to be much worse.

Some of the cable ISPs also have such asymmetric service that you can use most of the upload bandwidth just with ACKs while downloading. They often use ACK suppression to reduce the number ACKs and use the link more efficiently.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat