Bandwidth throttling

Bandwidth throttling is the intentional slowing of Internet service by an Internet service provider. It is a reactive measure employed in communication networks to regulate network traffic and minimize bandwidth congestion (for large companies that can afford to pay the ISP to take away service for local households and carry more bandwidth to them). Bandwidth throttling can occur at different locations on the network. On a local area network (LAN), a sysadmin may employ bandwidth throttling to help limit network congestion and server crashes. On a broader level, the Internet service provider may use bandwidth throttling to help reduce a user's usage of bandwidth that is supplied to the local network.

Throttling can be used to actively limit a user's upload and download rates on programs such as video streaming, protocols and other file sharing applications, as well as even out the usage of the total bandwidth supplied across all users on the network. Bandwidth throttling is also often used in Internet applications, in order to spread a load over a wider network to reduce local network congestion, or over a number of servers to avoid overloading individual ones, and so reduce their risk of crashing, and gain additional revenue by compelling users to use more expensive pricing schemes where bandwidth is not throttled.

Deprioritization - is one way of throttling network traffic. There are many different methods to throttle network traffic. DePrioritization is also called CoS (class of service) since traffic is classed into categories such as high, medium, and low (gold, silver, and bronze), and the lower the priority, the more "drop eligible" is a packet. E-mail and Web traffic is often placed in the lowest categories. When the network gets busy, packets from the lowest categories are dropped first. Deprioritization is a form of throttling as it results in a reduction of speed based on congestion among other factors. Many Wireless Carriers employ a type of throttling or Deprioritization.

A computer network typically consists of a number of servers, which host data and provide services to clients. The Internet is a good example, in which web servers are used to host websites, providing information to a potentially very large number of client computers.

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