It is inherent in the protocol, but providers are more than happy to deny you the option to use your local connection to host services and NAT took away the peer-to-peer nature of the internet before it really took off.
UPNP and some other firewall traversal tricks restored some of that but asymmetric bandwidth is the norm these days. Maybe with IPv6 we'll see a reversal of these trends.
See: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ (prescient and very depressing read, but read it anyway if you haven't done so).
UPNP and some other firewall traversal tricks restored some of that but asymmetric bandwidth is the norm these days. Maybe with IPv6 we'll see a reversal of these trends.