Bandwidth Throttling is any networking technology that controls the amount of network bandwidth used by servers or applications.
What is Bandwidth Throttling?
Generally, any networking technology that controls the amount of network bandwidth used by servers, applications, or network communication paths.
In the context of Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), for example, bandwidth throttling is a technique for controlling the amount of network bandwidth used by individual Web sites hosted on the server. Bandwidth throttling can be used to prevent hits on a popular site from overwhelming the server and preventing other sites hosted on the server from being accessed by clients.
For example, if five Web sites are being hosted on a single machine running IIS but one of them is extremely popular, the other sites might get starved for bandwidth and users might have difficulty connecting to them.
In order to rectify this situation, a specific maximum bandwidth level can be allocated to the popular site with the Internet Services Manager snap-in used for administering IIS using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
If this maximum bandwidth is exceeded, no further connections to that site are allowed until the bandwidth utilization level drops below the threshold. This allows the unallocated bandwidth to be shared among the remaining less popular sites so that users can connect to them.
What is peering?
Peering is when two ISPs connect and exchange traffic. Mutually beneficial under normal circumstances, peering causes problems when a popular streaming service (such as Netflix) forces one ISP to exceed the agreed traffic ratio, prompting the other one to ignore congestion and refuse to make adjustments.
That means you could be denied the internet speeds you paid for simply because your ISP refuses to resolve a peering conflict with another company.
What’s the best way to bypass ISP bandwidth throttling?
If your ISP is throttling your bandwidth, and switching providers is not an option, the easiest solution is to connect through VPN. A VPN, or virtual private network, encrypts your internet traffic, hiding it from your service provider. It won’t be able to inspect the data packets, so it won’t be able to throttle that traffic based on what service you’re using. The result is pure, unrestricted streaming video.
How to bypass peering conflicts with a VPN
Using a VPN also solves the congestion caused by peering conflicts. Instead of going through a third-party ISP to reach your content, your traffic travels on a privately maintained network, taking the most direct, least congested path between you and the content you love.
