You're doing some major catching up on podcasts and downloading all the lastest episodes on your high speed connection when all of a sudden... It seems like the speed goes to a stand-still. What's going on? Your 1 hour video podcast is going to take a day to download? Not cool! When this happens to me my first thought is... Bandwidth throttling by my ISP. And nothing ticks me off more than the 'man' taking advantage of that power. Can we figure out if this is happening? Possibly!

Google has a tool called MLab that measures your internet's performance. Through this website, you can use different tests to monitor your performance... Or... your computer's performance. Dirty. These can range from a regular speedtest with very detailed information, to a BitTorrent specific test. The other method is the Switzerland method by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Switzerland detects any modified packets traveling over your internets, which sometimes can mean your ISP is throttling or blocking your downloads.

Go to Measurement Lab and click on test your internet connection. Choose the first one: the network diagnostic tool, and click on Start. This test will look for your internet connection speed and anything slowing it down. The test takes about 20 seconds. Once finished, click on Statistics to see a detailed guide of your network traffic and how it may be limited. Next, run the Glasnost test. This test will look for traffic shaping when you are using such things as flash video or BitTorrent. This test takes about 8 minutes to finish, and make sure any downloads you have going are paused. When this test is finished, it'll tell you if it detects any kind of traffic shaping happening when using the selected program. The NPAD test will find and diagnose any problems in your end machine that have to do with network performance. Run this one and it will send and receive data, then show you any problems in red. Pathload2 is a bandwidth test that will find out what your available bandwidth is. For this test, you must download the EXE and run the test. The last test through mlabs is ShaperProbe- a traffic shaping test. It'll tell you if your isp is traffic shaping when you upload, download, or both, and the max burst size before shaping begins. You also have to download the EXE for this test as well, click start, and wait for the test to finish. Next is the Switzerland test. Download the .tgz or .zip over at Sourceforge. Extract the files from the folder and read the INSTALL.txt for information on how to install it on your specific platform.

Well, according to these tests, I'm not being throttled... I just have a really bad internet connection out here in Missouri!

Email me what you think at feedback@hak5.org.