How a VPN stops an ISP from throttling your online activities

Internet providers could be throttling your connection if you're gaming or streaming too much. Here's how a VPN for Mac can help prevent ISP traffic management from infringing on your fun.

Over the years, Internet service providers (ISPs) have offered increasing amounts of bandwidth to customers, promising fast Internet connections for downloads and streaming. However, the reality for some users can be one that's full of unseen restraints.

Though an ISP could genuinely provide a fat Internet pipe for a monthly fee, it may not necessarily leave it as an unrestricted connection. Depending on what you're doing online, you may find that the connection you experience is far below what is advertised.

This is an issue known as bandwidth throttling. It's also something that a service like a Virtual Private Network (VPN) can fix.

What is bandwidth throttling?

Simply put, bandwidth throttling is when an ISP reduces the amount of bandwidth available for a connection. This slows the Internet connection speed down for customers affected by it.

Depending on the systems and policies of the ISP, this can take the form of a limit on the connection as a whole. It can also be a limitation based on specific types of activity.

This sounds like an unfair action for the ISP to perform, since customers pay for access to the Internet to specific levels. However, the terms and conditions and acceptable usage policies of ISPs often include language that allows them to throttle a connection in a number of situations.

Why do ISPs throttle my Internet bandwidth?

There are a few main reasons for why an ISP will throttle a connection. Some are more legitimate than others.

The most obvious reason is during times of network congestion when many people are accessing the Internet at the same time. To make sure there's enough bandwidth for everyone, it can restrict the amount of bandwidth each user can use on the network.

It would be unfair on light Internet users browsing websites to find their relatively low-bandwidth usage is interrupted because many others are downloading game updates at the same time, consuming bandwidth. Throttling in this instance will preserve the light usage user's access, while slowing down the bulk users, ensuring that there is bandwidth available for everyone.

A connected issue is one of bandwidth limitations. Typically seen on mobile connections but also for some broadband services, you could be limited to a certain amount of data transfers per month at the fast advertised speed.

These sorts of connections are often bandwidth-restricted once the user reaches their allocation for the month. Beyond the limit, customers can be provided a much slower Internet connection, which can be usable but less useful for people with more intensive bandwidth needs.

The limitation typically lasts until the start of a new billing period, when new data cap allocations become available to use. The connection is then restored to full speed, at least until those allowances are used up again.

These providers can also have policies that provide unlimited access to specific apps and services that do not count towards the allowance. However, what is provided in this way will vary between ISPs.

For some ISPs, there is also the problem of paid prioritization, the so-called Internet Fast Lanes that the U.S. Net Neutrality policies aimed to combat.

Paid prioritization is a situation where an ISP can throttle connections to specific apps and services, while leaving other services unaffected. This could be due to services paying an ISP to provide more bandwidth to its servers than its rivals, or the ISPs getting a kickback for encouraging more use of one service than another.

This can be seen both as an anti-competitive move when instigated by the online services, or a shakedown effort by the ISP. A video streaming service would benefit from offering better streams to consumers by having more bandwidth available while their rivals have to work with less, but it could also be paying the ISP to ensure that extra bandwidth is available in the first place.

For consumers, this is a bad deal either way.

On the one hand, they are being limited in terms of what services have enough bandwidth available to work properly. On the other, the cost to the service of paying the ISP will be passed on to the consumer somehow.

The last main reason for bandwidth throttling is to reduce or prevent the use of connections for forbidden or restricted reasons. This largely consists of preventing users from accessing illegal content that breaks a country's laws.

How to tell if you're being throttled

There are a few ways you can check to see if you're being throttled, but some are more effective than others.

The first is to perform an Internet speed test, such as Ookla's Speedtest, against various servers online. This will tell you your upload and download rate for your connection as a whole, if you don't have any other network activity happening at the same time.

If the Speedtest result is far below what your ISP is supposed to provide you, throttling of your connection could be at play.

Running Speedtest on a Mac

Another way, for tasks involving large file transfers, is to check in the app for statistics showing the speed of the transfer. Again, if this is significantly slower than your advertised connection speed, then that may be getting throttled.

This may not necessarily mean your connection is being throttled though. It's still entirely possible that something on the Internet is slowing things up elsewhere, or that the servers you're downloading files from has its own limitations.

A surefire way is to use a VPN, which is done by performing similar speed tests with the VPN off, and with the VPN on.

How can a VPN help against throttling?

A Virtual Private Network is a private connection between your computer and a VPN service's server elsewhere on the Internet. The idea is that your traffic passes through the VPN's server before hitting the Internet itself.

It does so by encrypting the connection itself, making it a private tunnel to your nominated VPN server. The traffic inside of it cannot be sniffed by external sources, at least until it departs from the end VPN server.

Since it's an encrypted tunnel, it doesn't help in the instance where your data cap has been reached or a more general network congestion-based throttling is taking place.

Using a VPN can disguise your Internet usage from an ISP's snooping

Where it does come in handy is in instances where there's paid prioritization or throttling based on activity.

Since the ISP cannot check out what's inside the tunnel, it has no way of knowing what kinds of data are being transferred, nor their destinations. It therefore has to handle it as a large block of anonymous data transfers, and typically it will allow it through without any throttling.

The result is a connection that runs practically as if it isn't being throttled. For streaming services, you won't feel the effects of restricted bandwidth as you would using an ISP that prioritizes specific services.

For gamers, there's the potential benefit of having a better connection through a VPN, which could help improve your chances of winning. This is especially the case when it comes to playing on servers located on the other side of the world.

Throttling is here to stay

To end users, throttling is a combination of a necessary evil and an unwanted annoyance. It's needed when there are too many people going online at peak times, and to ensure those with bandwidth limits use only their fair share.

But at the same time, instances of paid prioritization and activity-based throttling will still cause problems in cases where consumers don't see any benefit in connection limitation.

Throttling is largely a tool that ISPs can wield to make sure everyone can get online. But one that can also be lucrative at the expense of the end user's experience.

Until we reach a time when infrastructure doesn't bottleneck connections anymore, throttling tools will still be available for ISPs to use and sometimes abuse.

At least for some of the ways it is used, a VPN for iPhone or Mac can serve as a mitigating factor.