Internet Bandwidth Throttling
With an ever greater amount of video being consumed online, many Internet users are in for a shock. There's a dirty little secret in the broadband industry: ISPs (Internet Service Providers) do not have the capacity to deliver the bandwidth that they claim to offer. One way ISPs attempt to conceal this problem is to place a cap of say 1GB per month per user, something which is common for many of the lower cost broadband packages on the market. Note that updating your operating system alone can eat up most of 1GB per month.
But what about those of us who pay more for "unlimited" broadband access? There should not be a problem, right? Wrong.
Unlimited does not always mean unlimited, as many ISPs impose a "fair use" policy which masks a monthly cap. Others employ bandwidth throttling, where under certain circumstances download speeds are reduced significantly. Their intent is to stop users who exhibit "abnormal behavior" – industry-speak for accessing so-called "illegal" P2P (Peer to Peer) file sharing networks – from degrading the service at the expense of others. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between illegal and legitimate use of P2P technology, particularly when it comes to online video.
Recently in an article titled, Channel 40's 4oD hamstrung by ISPs, CNet reported on the problems faced by the television channel's new on demand video service, which uses P2P technology similar to that used by "illegal" file sharing networks.
The problem is that packet shaping technology can not easily tell the difference between different kinds of P2P traffic.
A recent new policy introduced by an ISP cable company, Virgin Media, goes one step further. Instead of trying to distinguish between different kinds of traffic, throttling is employed during peak times (between 4pm and midnight) for individual users after they have consumed a set amount of bandwidth. So for example, customers paying for the top package will see their download speeds halved from 10Mb to 5Mb after they have consumed just 3GB. If you are looking at Google or YouTube video this could theoretically take just minutes.
Things are likely to get worse before they get better. In the meantime, there is nothing like the online video revolution to reignite the net neutrality debate.