Bandwidth throttling

Bandwidth throttling is a deliberate reduction of connection speed by the network or the provider, usually applied once you pass a data allowance. Nothing is broken and nothing is blocked — the traffic simply moves more slowly from that point until the allowance resets.

Throttling is not the same as a cap

A cap stops you: you hit the limit and the connection refuses further traffic, or you are billed for overage. Throttling lets you continue at reduced speed. Both come from the same place — a plan sold with a data allowance — but they fail in different ways, and a plan can have either or both.

Why it matters when you buy proxies

Most residential proxy plans are metered by the gigabyte, which makes bandwidth the real price rather than the headline rate. Anything that moves media — video, images, screenshots, long browsing sessions — burns an allowance far faster than people expect, and the slowdown arrives mid-job. White Cloak plans include unlimited bandwidth, so the cost of a run does not depend on how much it downloads.

A concrete example

Two people buy the same-priced plan. One is running text-only requests and never approaches the allowance. The other is loading image-heavy pages all day and is throttled by the second week, then spends an afternoon assuming the proxy is faulty. It is not — the plan is doing what it was sold to do. Throttling is a bandwidth problem, not a latency problem, and the two are worth telling apart before you complain about speed.