it would be really great if the upload speed was even a quarter as fast as the download speed.
Sadly the architecture of cable networks imposes limitations. Because several properties are sharing a single cable something has to prevent collisions (put simply something has to stop you and your neighbour both trying to send a packet at the same time). DOCSIS3.0 helped quite a lot but it's still an uphill struggle. xDSL doesn't have this particular limitation because everyone has a dedicated cable - in theory(*) an xDSL modem can use any frequency it wants for whatever purpose it wants whenever it wants.
I think it's fair to say that xDSL is topologically more suited to bi-directional networking than cable (no surprise - given the original intent of cable). But later versions of DOCSIS have done a helluva lot to workaround the limitations of the basic architecture. There may be more to come and the guys doing the research are well aware that upload speed is important.
(*)In practice it can't. Frequency plans exist to minimise interference between cables in the same bundle and the DSLAM will almost certainly only support particular up or downstream rates.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
