How to know if ISP is throttling?

Question

I'm using rapidshare.com as the meter gauge.

I recently switched my ISP. Let's say my speed is 1 Mbps, which should give me around 110 kb/s download speed at max. If I go to my ISP's website or speedtest.net to test my speed, it always give me around 950 kbps, which is very reasonable.

But when I'm actually direct downloading something, whether it be from megaupload/rapidshare/mediafire or other DD services, my speed is REALLY slow. Out of the max 110 kb/s, I'm only getting 30 kb/s max. It varies greatly from 6 kb/s to 50 kb/s but it's never constantly above 50 kb/s. I've tried using my friend's connection and I got max speed. So it's definitely my ISP.

I suspect my ISP is throttling somehow but how can I know for sure? All the sites to test my speed comes out near 1 Mbps. When I call them, I have nothing.

This is really maddening because I have to be with this ISP for at least 6 months =( How can I bypass this or prove it?

Answer 1

Firstly, if you are a free user on Rapidshare, they now introduce a new limitation to free user which only gives you 50kBps, sometimes it gets to 30kbps.

Its their new policy, where you can download continously one file after another, but your bandwidth is limited

Furthermore, it may be that your ISP is using different gateway, limited bandwidth and stuff like that.

Its not necessarily throttling, because rapidshare transfer is a normal HTTP protocol data transfer

And keep this point in mind (everone seems to forget this)

1 Mbps means your line is 1Mbps connecting to your ISP server. You will get 1Mbps in your country

But it does NOT guarantee you 1Mbps connection with other country, because that depends on your ISP international bandwidth.

They do not guarantee you 1Mbps to every corner of the world

Different ISP have different international performance, depends on how much the spend on their bandwidth