How to avoid traffic throttling?
Traffic throttling has already been identified as an issue and ISPs the world over are being asked to provide internet speeds to their clients’ at the actual advertised level/s. Any discrepancy or failure to comply with government and international internet regulatory authorities’ directives is strictly frowned upon. Although such regulations are still not mandatory for the ISPs, there are suggestions that this might be the scenario in the immediate future, if compliance levels continue to remain poor. The United Kingdom telecom regulator, Ofcom, Rogers Communication Inc., Comcast, Bell & Cogeco in Canada, and the FCC in United States have already borne frontal attacks by consumer protection authorities’ and other organizations’ to cease employing traffic throttling measures immediately.
At the ISP level, administrators can allocate bandwidths according to their hardware handling capacities and consumer usage patterns, after conducting appropriately designed feedback surveys and studies. At the personal level, end users can buy computers with better processors, subscribe to cable broadband services’ offering stupendous speeds and tweak their operating system (OS) software to allocate appropriate bandwidths for downloading and uploading actions. Open source, free and shareware software are available on the internet to test whether one’s internet connection speed is being throttled by their ISPs or not. Solutions and tweaks to overcome traffic throttling are available on blogs and also via application software’s which tweak the settings on particular operating systems automatically, without the need for the end-user to be tech savvy. Some of the popular software’s available to the end user are Glasnost and Google’s Measurement Lab (MLab). Tech savvy end users can tweak the settings of their web browsers and operating systems to acquire higher bandwidth depending upon whether they prefer uploading or downloading. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the basic communication language over the internet and its performance can be manipulated to suit one’s internet usage regimen. The IP (Internet Protocol) is the lower layer of this two layered combination which handles the address portion of the information packet/s to be transmitted. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the higher layer which manages the assemblage of information to be transmitted over the internet. Each ISP has its own, unique TCP/IP settings which are essential for internet and connection to The World Wide Web. The most appropriate settings when used provide the end user with optimum bandwidth available for a single user. The end user is free to manipulate bandwidth allocation through browser settings and can overcome throttling by stopping unnecessary services which encroach on bandwidth by running hidden in the background. Such services include antivirus and operating system updates and third party software updates which can be curbed or altogether stopped by the tech savvy end user.
