That seems really poor; they clearly thought (probably correctly) that 'gigabit' was an easier sell (to the masses) than '500Mbps symmetric' or some other split.

It doesn't help you, but Hyperoptic are an ISP in the UK with all plans except the lowest being symmetric. I used to pay (moved out of the area^) £28pcm for symmetric 100Mbps, or maybe 150 - either way it was fairly consistently 160/180Mbps as measured. A&A are also by all accounts amazing, but only HN-browsing nerds more impressed with 800M symmetric than 1G are their customers anyway. Hyperoptic I like because they're primarily serving 'the masses' but seem the only non-shitty ones.

^I now use a Mikrotik 4G modem & router. It's not as fast but it's enough, (ongoing) costs even less; I think with some tweaking - especially mounting it outside - I can do better, but it's been so fine that I haven't bothered yet, over the course of months. A lot more asymmetric though, I wouldn't build and push images quite as casually as I might have before.

Is paying for your own fiber install common? I'm in a mid-90's home in the US and AT&T just recently decided they wanted to enter our market with Fiber and will install free of charge with no contract to whoever wants to switch. Certainly no easy task, but I understand that homes/infrastructure outside of the US can also be significantly older.

Your home networking setup (which this law is about) has nothing to do with symmetric/asymmetric bandwidth allotted to you by the ISP.

I'm pretty sure all fiber is bi-directional and achieving gigabit without fiber seems silly.

I'd pay 10k for a fiber install if that was an option.