Mobile Broadband Throttling

If your mobile broadband connection seems to be fast one minute and sluggish the next, it is likely that your ISP is throttling your bandwidth. Throttling is a bandwidth control strategy that ISPs use to limit users who are heavy downloaders in an effort to give everyone an equal amount of the available bandwidth allowance an ISP has for all its customers. There is always a minority of users that an ISP has to throttle for the sake of the majority. If you are a heavy mobile broadband user, you can be certain that your ISP has put a cap on your connection speed during peak times that other casual users will be online.

You can read about your ISP’s throttling policy on their website, although the terminology used will probably be different. Throttling generally comes under an ISP’s Fair Usage policy, and they sometimes refer to throttling as Traffic Management or Shaping. If you are a typical mobile broadband user who only browses the web and checks email, you will probably never see any great difference in your connection speed at any time, but if you use your connection heavily to download or upload files, visit video sharing sites, and so on, your connection speeds will be noticeably inconsistent, depending on the day and the time of day when most other customers are online.