Levels when an ISP starts to throttle

[Tydmors]

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if anyone knew when certain ISPs start to throttle you.

If i'm not mistaken we had a list somewhere in a thread but i've been looking since yesterday but cannot find it anywhere.

Does anyone perhaps know, lets say when Mweb starts to throttle you when you are not on one of their Premium accounts.

If i remember correctly, the premium accounts throttle on the following levels:
1MB/s --- 100GB
2MB/s --- 200GB
4MB/s --- 400GB
10MB/s --- 1000GB

But i have no idea when the normal uncapped accounts get throttled.
i'm on their 4mb/s account and it seems to be +- 100GB of usage in the last 30 days.

[BeoTeK]

IIRC it generally varies, depending on ISP and their discretion. Read their EULA and generally it says that they will throttle when they deem to be unfair/busy network usage.

[matt]

They are usually pretty vague and non-committal about exact amounts of traffic. I know I was getting throttled on a 4Mbps Web Africa account, doing a bit over 100GB per month, but they work on a 10 day rolling window, and I think it's a percentage based thing, like if you're in the top x percent of bandwidth users, you're on a certain star level, and they throttle everyone at that level when there's congestion. Especially bad during business hours.

[Tydmors]

Thanks for the info guys.

I searched around and it seems that its hard to find an ISP that actually says when they will throttle you.

[Nimatek]

@Tydmors, even if the ISP provides a guideline to follow, assume that they won't stick to it.

WebAfrica broke my uncapped experience over the last couple of months. I used to download about 160gb worth per month, however that slacked off to less than 100gb and mostly around 60gb in a month.

However my throttling experience was worse at the lower usages than it had ever been on the high usage. They couldn't explain it to me at all. I used 2gb worth of data on a Tuesday for updates, next day I had a 3 star rating. With only 20gb total uasge...

Killed my uncapped account and am now using their capped 90 + 180GB package and no more hassles at all.

I guess you just need to jump around and use the ISP that gives the best speed at the time. When it becomes unbearable, jump ship.

[matt]

@Tydmors, even if the ISP provides a guideline to follow, assume that they won't stick to it.

WebAfrica broke my uncapped experience over the last couple of months. I used to download about 160gb worth per month, however that slacked off to less than 100gb and mostly around 60gb in a month.

However my throttling experience was worse at the lower usages than it had ever been on the high usage. They couldn't explain it to me at all. I used 2gb worth of data on a Tuesday for updates, next day I had a 3 star rating. With only 20gb total uasge...

Killed my uncapped account and am now using their capped 90 + 180GB package and no more hassles at all.

I guess you just need to jump around and use the ISP that gives the best speed at the time. When it becomes unbearable, jump ship.

Ya, my WA uncapped went downhill lately, and I had my wife's work on WA uncapped as well and they were getting heavily throttled during business hours lately, which is really bad for a business, and they tend to use about 70-80GB per month. I've now got Afrihost business 4Mbps at home, and the wife's work I've changed to 10Mbps 90+180GB WA, and I'll make a decision later in the month to cancel the WA cancellation or keep them on that.

[Tydmors]

I've also thought about moving over to capped as i don't go over 100GB a month on a regular basis as speeds are a bit slow, but last month i had a good month and perhaps did 160 in 30 days and MWEB basically killed my connection down to something that won't even stream youtube vids. So i think I will definitely look at one of the Axxess or WA options.
Damn, did not see WA has this with their capped accounts -- unlimited gigs between midnight & 6am every day

[ClockworkNinja]

I'm with Axxess now. Not the best to be honest. I've been having serious trouble with them. Their Business lines are great though and not badly priced. Pity that upload speed unfortunately.

[Nimatek]

And they are running another special month where you get 50TB of data usage from midnight to 6am. just need my damn fibre now!!!

Not had a day's worth of trouble on the capped account, netflix and gaming running smooth Uncapped is a joke, again

[HavocXphere]

Mostly doesn't work like that anymore...

In very simplified terms...they essentially "score" you based on what type of traffic it is and at what time of day. Then when the network is low on capacity the guys with the worse score get shaped.

If you really feel you must move a ton of data use Telkom's after hours thing on their soft-capped packages...that after hours part you can essentially push to the max.

And very few ISPs "throttle" in the true sense...its mostly just aggressive shaping.