Your Connection and Data Throttling What You Need to Know Now: Part 1

In 2020, along with 1,001 other strange things, a huge number of people across the world, including here in California, have found themselves displaced from their offices and working from home. Which means that they are no longer relying on their company’s superfast business Internet in the office but their own home network and their own ISP.

Many have found that, even if their company has been willing to pick up the tab for upgraded Internet access – which some have and some haven’t – they never quite seem to get the speeds they are paying for, or, if they do it comes in bursts before slowing down.

What the heck is going on is a reasonable question here, especially if slow Internet speeds are affecting your work. Buffering Netflix is one thing, being kicked out of an important Zoom meeting because your Internet connection fails is quite another.

In this two part series we are going to take a closer look at this problem, starting with an issue many people do not understand: data throttling.

Believe it or not, internet bandwidth is never truly unlimited. The signal being sent to your devices is coming from a single cell tower that is shared with many other individuals simultaneously.

For this reason, internet service providers (ISPs) may sometimes “throttle,” or limit, your usage to certain speeds without expressly telling you when they are doing it in order to free up bandwidth for others connected to the same tower.

Typically, ISPs only throttle what they consider to be a “heavy” internet user — as per their own definition — during “times of high traffic.”

It’s frustrating to run a speed test and see that you’re getting less speed than you’re paying for. The question is: are you being throttled? Or is it some other issue?

What Is Throttling Data?

Throttling is the process of an ISP purposely slowing down an internet user’s data transmission. Sometimes you’ll see lower speeds that are difficult to explain and aren’t attributed to equipment issues. You won’t always receive a clear notification that your connection is throttled despite rules that pressure telecom companies to inform you, so the uncertainty regarding your slower connection can be incredibly frustrating.

Currently, you’ll usually see a throttling of your entire connection, but with the repeal of Net Neutrality, some people worry that ISPs may start throttling specific types of content. This is not yet a common issue.

Why Do ISPs Throttle Data?

There are multiple reasons why an ISP might throttle data:

  1. You have met your data limit. Many people have data limits on their internet connections. When they exceed the allotted amount of data, their speeds will often be drastically reduced.

Instead of cutting off access to internet service completely, ISPs instead prioritize customers that are within the terms of their plan. The slower speeds can be incredibly annoying, but it’s definitely preferable to losing the ability to surf the web completely.

  1. You are connected during a “high traffic” time. While bandwidth isn’t usually an issue for major internet providers, the fact remains that it is a finite resource. With extremely heavy data use that exceeds allowances, ISPs may need to throttle some connections in order to provide high speeds to the rest of their customers. This may be becoming more common in your area as thousands of people continue to work from home and will do for the foreseeable future.
  2. Your ISP is choosing to throttle your specific activity. With the repeal of Net Neutrality, the ability of an ISP to throttle may be expanded, adding the ability to throttle specific types of content or to charge higher fees to major data users such as streaming services like Netflix. If costs are increased dramatically for these content providers, the costs of paying off ISPs may be passed down to you.

How To Check If Your ISP Is Throttling Bandwidth

Note that throttling results in extremely low download speeds, while more common issues like Netflix congestion only cause a 10–40% speed reduction.

The most obvious way to tell if your internet is being throttled would be to run a free speed test available online. Unfortunately, most internet providers can detect speed tests and artificially inflate your speeds to make it appear that they’re not throttling you.

So, a speed test isn’t a foolproof way to identify internet throttling.

The only reliable method of checking whether your connection is throttled is through a Virtual Private Network, also known as a VPN.

ISPs may sometimes throttle only specific types of content, and a VPN can make this practice next to impossible by masking your IP address and activities from your ISP.

With your ISP forced to treat all of your content equally due to the inability to discern what sort of websites you’re viewing, you should then be able to measure your true speeds using an online speed test.

So, to reiterate, you can tell if your internet is being throttled by following these steps:

  1. Run an Internet Speed Test
  2. Use a reputable VPN
  3. Run the test again using the VPN to see if you get a different result.

If your speeds are significantly lower than normal and you can’t explain the problem after following the steps in the troubleshooting section below, the odds are that your connection is being throttled.

How To Fix Data Throttling

Thankfully, there are a couple of practical steps you can take to fix internet data throttling:

  1. Monitor your monthly data usage. If you’ve exceeded your data limit on a capped plan, you can usually avoid the issue by better monitoring your usage moving forward or switching to a plan with higher data allowances. If your data is supposed to be “unlimited,” however, there may not be an easy fix.
  2. Sign up for a reputable VPN. A good VPN may be able to provide you a solution to internet throttling. If a VPN cannot solve the issue, you may need to resort to one of the next two steps. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that many large online services such as Netflix and Hulu are getting better at detecting VPNs and may restrict you from using their services if they cannot determine your location.
  3. Switch to a new internet service provider. Some ISPs are more notorious when it comes to slowing down its users, and almost every ISP has a different data cap in its terms. If you are constantly being throttled, you may want to sign up with another internet service provider that has a significantly higher data cap.
  4. Express your concerns to government representatives. If these solutions don’t work for you, the only real recourse that remains is to try to convince representatives and Federal Communications Commission officials to fight for a more open internet. By submitting an FCC comment voicing your concerns or contacting your congressperson, you can add your voice to the many fighting against predatory throttling and content prioritization.

But what if you go through all of this and find that your slow Internet is not a result of data throttling at all? Now what should you do? This is an issue we’ll explore in the next part of this article.