What is traffic throttling?
As the literal meaning of the phrase suggests, traffic throttling is a simile to what happens on the road when automobile traffic gets blockaded. While surfing the internet, if one does not get onto the desired page or is unable to download the expected amount of data in the expected interval of time, frustration is the most likely resultant emotion experienced by the end user. The difference lies in the fact that traffic throttling when referred to internet usage is an intentional and deliberate attempt by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to throttle bandwidth usage, when an end user attempts to visit particular sites. The motive of the ISP is to support traffic flow towards associate websites and away from that of competitors and sites providing so called free and shareware software’s. The intent has purely commercial interests,’ with the sole motive of making consumers pay for the services rendered. The ISPs disguise their traffic throttling activity by referring to it by a more innocuous term, ‘traffic management’. The end user wishes to exercise one’s options while surfing the net in a democratic manner by choosing what, where, when, how much and how less one needs to download. However, this is not the case as embedded software in browsers and operating systems’ directs them towards sites driven by commercial interests. However, traffic throttling is not as bad as it sounds because traffic control on the internet is desirable, as it prevents network congestion, which if unbridled, can lead to chaos on the internet. What one experiences as an end user is the allocation of bandwidth, which can be done at the local level by a systems’ administrator or at the gross level by the ISP, while providing services at different rates and speeds’ to the end user. Most internet connections’ are regulated by allocating bandwidth to ‘download and upload functions’ in a healthy ratio so as not to compromise each other. There have been issues regarding traffic throttling at various levels and in diverse locations all over the world, wherein the affected internet users and businesses have protested unilateral traffic control (read throttling) exercised by the ISPs discreetly. Traffic throttling is achievable both at the hardware and software levels. At the hardware level, data is processed according to processor handling capabilities, the maximum speeds routers are able to handle and the intensity as well as frequency of client connections with a primary server. At the software level, programmers can allocate bandwidth by tweaking the rate of information flow to and from the servers via inbuilt operating system programs.
