You, as the user of an internet connection or service, rarely benefit from bandwidth throttling. Very simply, bandwidth throttling means limiting how fast you can access something when online. Companies along the path between you and your web-based destination, on the other hand, often have much to gain from bandwidth throttling.

For example, an ISP might throttle bandwidth during certain times of the day to decrease congestion over their network, which lowers the amount of data they have to process at once, saving them the need to buy more and faster equipment to handle internet traffic at that level. Another reason a service provider might throttle bandwidth is to provide a way for users to avoid the throttling by paying for a more expensive service that doesn’t limit bandwidth. In other words, the bandwidth throttling might just be an incentive to encourage heavy users to upgrade their plan.

While very controversial, ISPs also sometimes throttle bandwidth only when the traffic on the network is of a certain kind or from a certain website. For example, an ISP might throttle the bandwidth of a user only when heavy amounts of data is being downloaded from Netflix or uploaded to other devices via P2P file sharing (e.g., torrent sites). Sometimes, an ISP will throttle all types of traffic for a user after a certain threshold has been reached. This is one way they “lightly” enforce the written, or sometimes unwritten, bandwidth caps that exist with some ISP’s connection plans.

ISP-based bandwidth throttling is most common, but it can also happen inside business networks. For example, your computer at work may have an artificial limit placed on its connection to the internet because the system administrators decided to put one there.On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes an end-service itself will throttle bandwidth. For example, a cloud backup service might throttle bandwidth during the large initial upload of your data to their servers, drastically slowing down your backup time but saving them a lot of money.

Similarly, Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) services might also throttle bandwidth at certain times to prevent their services from overloading and crashing. On the other side of it is you, the user, who might want to throttle bandwidth on your own when downloading or uploading data. This type of throttling is usually called bandwidth control and is most likely done to prevent all the bandwidth from being used for that one purpose.

A bandwidth control program can help ease congestion on your own network in much the same way that throttling controls bandwidth on business networks. It’s often a feature in programs that deal with heavy traffic, like torrent clients and download managers.