Let’s say your internet plan has a data cap of 50GB per month at high speeds. What with work, streaming, social media and downloads, you happen to exceed this limit. Your ISP might reduce (throttle) your connection speed for the remainder of the billing cycle to allow increased bandwidth to open up on their network. Depending on how much your speed decreases it can mean a noticeable drag on streaming, downloading, and browsing.

Another example is during peak usage times. Some ISPs may throttle bandwidth to alleviate network congestion, ensuring that all users get a fair share of the network resources. This might mean that during peak hours, like in the evenings when more people are online, users might experience slower internet speeds. These might not be noticeable depending on your connection type and your online activities.

Bandwidth throttling is the intentional slowing down of internet speed by an internet service provider (ISP) or network administrator. Throttling can also be used for specific types of traffic; for example, an ISP might throttle video streaming services to lower bandwidth usage, while leaving other types of traffic like email or web browsing at normal speeds.

If your plan has a data limit, set alerts in the ISP app, or routinely check your data used to date in your account settings, to know better when to expect a slowdown if one is looming on the horizon.