Bandwidth Throttling
Typically an ISP will allocate a certain portion of bandwidth to a neighbourhood, which is then sold to residents within the neighbourhood. It is common practice for ISP companies to oversell the amount of bandwidth as typically most customers will only use a fraction of what they're alloted. By overselling, ISP companies can lower the price of service to their customers per gigabit alloted. On some ISPs, however, when one or a few customers use a larger amount than expected, the ISP company will purposely reduce the speed of that customer's service for certain protocols, thus throttling their bandwidth. This is done through a method called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), which allows an ISP to detect the type of traffic being sent and throttle it if it is not high priority and using a large fraction of the bandwidth. Bandwidth throttling of certain types of traffic (i.e. peer-to-peer file sharing) can be scheduled during specific times of the day to avoid congestion at peak usage hours. As a result, customers should all have equal internet speeds.
Encrypted data may be throttled or filtered causing major problems for businesses that use Virtual Private Networks (VPN)s and other applications that send and receive encrypted data.
Read more about this topic: Network Neutrality In Canada, Types of Net Control