Can Internet providers restrict speed on most sites?
 

I live in Nicaragua, Central America and every time I move with a
new Internet provider I have to fight with them in order to get
the speed contracted. In my country the best speed available is
2MB and that's what I contracted with my present provider and I
did get that speed for the first couple of months but from May 15
to 3 days ago my speed from 2PM to 9PM was like 128Kilobits to 512
Kilobits. The funny thing is that if they came to my home and ran
Speedtest,Speakeasy or their own speed test page the results are
surprisingly perfect. So I am thinking that this people restrict speed
on all sites during the time I mentioned but do allow it on certain sites,
like the ones they use to fool people when they complain about not
getting the speed contracted. Can they do this? Can they restrict
speed on all sites but allow it to the max on specific sites?
For the last 3 nights my speed is back but this is the third provider
that I have had the same fight. At the end I always win but its tire
some.

Bo

It's the same here in Brazil. I'm not even sure if any government legislation for services exists here but even if it does it sure ain't applied which about sums up Brazil full stop :)

Until my recent move we had no landline options at the old address so I was forced to use the Claro wireless. Having read so many complaints about the bandwidth provided I opted for the lowest 256 to be sure of getting mine! Even so, every day during peak periods the HSDPA service disappears and I only have EDGE, and at least twice a day the whole service is switched off. When you ring to complain, the child slave at the other end of the phone knows nothing, can do nothing and seems to care little anyway. Here, the most consistent service providers are the smaller private ISP's but most of these tend to package TV as well which is something I don't want. I've now just applied for a landline connection with Oi which was formerly Telemar, the Brazil state owned service before privatisation. As far as I can tell, I'm still unlikely to get the full bandwidth paid for but at least the connection itself will remain stable.

If you have such things as consumer pressure groups in Nicaragua, you could try contacting them.

Hi MC thanks for your reply. Claro is also my provider as of now and
I always end up having to go to top mgmt. in order to get what I
pay for. I always get it at the end but I feel real bad knowing that
most people are not getting what they pay for. I am hard headed
so I call everybody and give them hell for a while until they give up
and give me the contracted speed. I always threaten them with going
higher and higher and they get tired of me before I get tired of them.
When my speed is a mess I usually take pictures of files been DL
and I send them to the right people so they ll know that they should
not play with me.
What you think MC can they restrict speed on ALL sites but allow full
speed on selected ones? Like speedtest,speakeasy and their own speed
test page.
Claro is a big company and you should go to them and show them that
you know that you are not getting what you pay for so you get the speed
that you contracted. I think I beat Claro because I just got home a little
while ago and DL a few files and my DL speed is about 210 Kilobytes. This
is the 4th night on a row that I got my speed back so I think I won but
I wont let my guard down with this people.
Bo

Why does this sound familiar? :D

I'm sure that the technology must exist for this and no doubt they will be happy to apply it in the knowledge that no one will stop them even if the legislation exists.

Just as another example, we've just bought a house here with a fair chink of jungle (they called it "the garden" :)) attached to it. We already knew this was a protected area but weren't bothered because we wanted to have the trees anyway. Without even being asked though, the local mayor official who came out to assess the IPTU offered me a license to chop the trees for 500 reais. This sort of stuff is all alien to me being from the UK but my wife of course has lived with it always.

I'm just not going to bother with Claro any more because in a couple of weeks or so I should be connected to Oi's landline net.

@MC
What you experience with the local mayor is the kind of thing
that make countries on our side of the world stay behind the
rest. In Nicaragua normal people like us always encounter that
kind of thing. Anyway, like everything in life some is good and
some is bad and this side of the world also has some good.
I hope your OI connection is stable and better than what
you have now. On my case my speed is fine today for the
5th day on a row.
Bo

Some ISP's in the US have been called under fire by the FCC for throttling bandwidth and illegal traffic shaping when their customers are using certain sites, like p2p, streaming video sites, etc. In fact it was found that some ISP's were capping bandwidth on websites that competed with their own services. An example of this are those that offer optional tv packages would restrict sites like Hulu because they wanted their customers to give up trying to watch tv online.So yes I think it would be possible for an ISP to restrict ip addresses while setting their servers to allow only certain ones full bandwidth.

You might be interested to try testing your connection with http://www.measurementlab.net/ and here is a good article about m-lab. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...rement_lab.php

Thanks Ritho for this information and the links. Explains a lot.

Thanks Ritho, I would of never thought that Internet providers would
do something like this in the US and try to get away with it.
I saved on my favorites the link for speed testing and will use it next
time I have this kind of situation with my provider.
Once again thanks to you and MC for the insight.
Bo