[NYTimes] Putting the Brakes on Web-Surfing Speeds

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State-of-the-art Web surfing, for all of its breathtaking speed, can be baffling. A favorite page gets hung up. A data-intensive application, like playing a video or downloading large files, stutters or stops. Is it the telecommunications operator? Is it the Web site? Is it the smartphone or the computer? Or just a sign of Internet thrombosis?

Krishna Gummadi, the head of the Networked Systems Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems […] says the blame often lies with the telecom operator, which is selectively slowing broadband speeds to keep traffic flowing on its network, using a sorting technique called throttling.

In 2008, Mr. Gummadi and a graduate student, Marcel Dischinger, developed a free software gauge that detected whether broadband service was being throttled by a network operator.[…]