I spend a lot of time in remote areas so I'm constantly hitting various limits for mobile Internet. The reps are often trained to say they don't throttle ... because what they are doing is "deprioritizing" heavy users. The way to think of it, which is mostly technically accurate, is "throttling" would be they see the amount of traffic you are generating and then say "No, 10% of that from now to end of billing cycle." What they instead do is go down a couple of layers in the OSI model and instead say "That device gets access to the tower only after everyone else has had their shot."
Yes, its semantic bullshit.
I know of a handful of ways to spot throttling by looking at the Layer 2/3/4 frames and packets. I don't know of any way to spot deprio from an endpoint device except to wait until the end of the billing cycle and see if the problem goes away.
It's entirely possible that rebooting, and thus reregistering with the tower, puts you into a higher priority bucket for a few minutes. In fact, one well known trick for being able to get a call through in an emergency is to go into airplane mode and back thus reregistering with the tower and putting you in a "new device" priority classification.
" What they instead do is go down a couple of layers in the OSI model and instead say "That device goes access to the tower only after everyone else has had their shot."
This is what I've been feeling like. Late at night, 2am ish I seem to be able to get 1mbps speeds.
One odd thing is my download speed is ALWAYS slower than my upload speeds, no matter in the middle of the night or after I removed my SIM card and rebooted the phone (which does temporarily boost my speeds)
I've been using anywhere from 50 to 90GB's of data a month through hotspot for nearly a year now, so it'd be weird that they just now decided to start jewing me. I'd like to have good faith in them but getting a new SIM card is my only option left other than leaving the company.
They may have spent more time dicking with their Quality of Service configurations for download due to needing to knock down streamers.
As to suddenly getting deprio hammer, could be more end devices in your area or a topology change with the towers. Hard to know.
When I first contacted them about a week ago they told me Verizon, who's towers they use, were currently in the process of implementing 5G networks which could have an affect on my speeds, but they told me my speeds should not be as bad as sub 100kbps.
But 1) I'm a bit rural and don't think we have 5G here yet, and 2) I know several people who have Verizon and haven't been having any issues with their internet speeds recently.
I haven't had to use internet this slow since 1998
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