I can't disagree too much, upload speeds are really disappointing. As one other poster pointed out, this can have a negative effect on entrepreneurs trying to bootstrap businesses from home.

As for why upload speeds are awful, my experience has been that it is a trade-off that has been calculated by the ISP. But not in the way I suspected. Any link level device that uses a single (simplex) medium (wifi, fixed wireless, mobile wireless, cable modems, DSL modems, etc. as opposed to Ethernet, which is generally duplex) only has so much bandwidth available.

At the WISP I worked for, we used to use Canopy 900mhz radios to provide fixed wireless service as well as backhaul for our city-wide mesh network. Since these radios only had ~3.3mbps aggregate bandwidth, we had to decide how to allocate it. In our case, we chose something like 5:1 download to upload ratio. This was a conscious choice about how best to use the available spectrum/bandwidth. I believe the same is true for cable/DSL media. Please feel free to correct me.