Throttling Your Internet Like A Flooded Engine

Spring must almost be here as I haven't seen snow falling for at least half a day!  Well, I'm looking to the positive here.  And I tell my friends, you won't catch me complaining once this summer about the temperature.  Especially after the very, very, very, cold winter we have gone through.  I would even take a bet...

So I previously blogged about being very excited to get an iPhone on Verizon.  Yes, an iPhone is nice, it is especially nice when you are connected to a WiFi network, as browsing and Internet interaction is very snappy. 

But what typically happens when you are not in the vicinity of a WiFi network?  The first time I tried this, when attached to Verizon's 3G network, I received an error that applications over 20mb cannot be downloaded over Verizon's network.  Hmmmm.  All I was trying to do was update an existing application. 
Lucky for me there are WiFi networks almost everywhere.  I go to my neighbors, church, or work and my iPhone automatically starts using the appropriate WiFi network.  However, there are many situations where my iPhone can "see" a WiFi network, but the owner is not willing to share it with me.  In those cases I am forced to use the Verizon network.  And in a lot of those cases, the network is unbelievably slow.

If I do minimal Internet activities, like checking the weather, that happens rather quickly, but updating applications, checking scores on ESPN, etc. will be quite slow.

In networking, a group of computers are connected together through a device called a hub or a router.  Then the router connects to the Internet, which is really a very large world-encapsulating router, well series of routers.  The hub that your PC immediately connects to, usually your ISP, has a limited bandwidth.  Lets say this is hypothetically 2mb.  If I am the only one connected to this hub, then I get all of the 2mb.  I can stream video at 384kb/sec, surf the web, and listen to Internet radio at 110kb/sec.  There is plenty of bandwidth left over!

Now, lets say my two neighbors also use the same ISP and they are streaming their favorite movies, in HD, at 784kb/sec.  Now roughly all 2mb of the bandwidth is being used.  The a third neighbor wants to play Wizards of Warcraft with his brother in England and there you have it.  You hub has exceeded the maximum bandwidth.

So what happens is the ISP's line of defense.  The ISP can let the bandwidth choke, becoming congested.  The quality of my browsing will become very slow, the video will degrade in quality, or skip, or pause, and the on-line game will have lengthy pauses.  The other option of the ISP is to throttle the Internet connection of a user who is using too much bandwidth to be able to let other customers have a good Internet experience.  I have seen both with my ISP.

The same is true with the cell phone industry.  You have cell towers that act as hubs on the cell phone provider's Internet system.  If you are the only one on that hub, you get all the bandwidth.  (In tests Verizon 3G has given 1.9mbps, which is pretty good.)  But what happens when you have 100 or 1000 or even 10,000 people using that same hub?  All of those users get to share the 1.9mbps, and if a significant portion of them are using the Internet, things can slow down really quickly!

One things that the Cell Phone companies can do is throttle your Internet connection if you consistently use more bandwidth than they think you should.  They do this by tracking the amount of data you use over a given time period, usually a month.  When the iPhone was initially offered, Verizon gave an unlimited data plan.  Hence, basically, you can use all the data you want, per month, but you have to deal with the performance you get with what all the other people on your hub are doing.  The other option that some cell phone companies are using is this idea of slowing down or throttling the Internet connections of high usage customers.  This could be checked in a couple of ways.  Let's assume that you cell phone company has an "unlimited" data plan, which really translates to 5GB a month.  And lets say you use that 5GB in two days.  Then the cell phone company effectively slows down (shuts off) your data access until next month.  The other option is that your cell phone company monitors your data usage during "peak" times and if your usage is "excessively" high, throttles your connection down to say 12kbs or less.

Since I am not a very heavy data user (I check my cell phone bill, only 30-50mb a month) the slowness I see must be from the congestion at the hub or cell tower.  It will be interesting to see what Verizon and other cell phone companies do to resolve these problems in the future.  Maybe the adoption of 4G will help -- maybe it will provide a bigger data pipe to the individual cell phone users.  Only time will tell.

Till next time,
Bill