Internet service providers tend to throttle[3] internet speed of heavy users which reaches a monthly data cap. For example, if you stream online videos on Hulu[4] or Netflix[5] or torrenting[6] a lot, your ISP might start slowing down the speed for the certain media sources. Your Netflix video quality might drop-off from 4K to 1080 or even more. So if you have an unlimited internet plan, it does not mean, that you can stream online videos all the month. Once you hit a 100 GB limit during the month, you might also feel what Spectrum internet throttling is.
Moreover, many Internet service providers including and Spectrum does not like the traffic from P2P[7]/BitTorrent[8] connections. It means that if you are a passionate user of torrents, you also might face the throttling of Spectrum.
The saddest part is that it is very difficult to prove that Spectrum is throttling the internet. You might notice the internet speed slowdowns during the online video streaming or torrenting sessions, but after some time it rises again. If you will call the support center, they might say, that it was just a simple slowdown because of overloaded line.
In the United States, internet throttling is an illegal activity which was regulated by the law in 2011. Federal Communications Commission is monitoring the bandwidth and speed throttling, of the biggest service providers. Many internet service providers like Spectrum or Comcast Xfinity agreed that they are not using this technique. However, technologies are going forward and there are many places for the manipulations.
How to know if Spectrum is throttling the internet?
The best way to find out what is going on with the speed is to perform a speed test during the Netflix, Hulu or torrenting sessions. There are many various online speed test applications, but you can try SpeedTest.NET
Also, you can try the internet health test which makes some additional speed test in one time and shows you the speed of the internet. We did the test but as you can see from the results, our connection was not affected by internet throttling at this time. If you have any concerns about the internet speed, make your test with the internet health test and see what happens.
Also, you can try to scan ports with some special tools. There is some available software on the market or you can use a free online tool – Port Scanner. If you are using torrenting software and you feel that something is not right, try this tool and see if some ports are blocked.