Ever had your bandwidth throttled?

I just moved into a new place and tested my bandwidth. I was clocking 5.5 Mb down and 7.0 up. Decided to download a bunch of games on steam (one by one, mind you) and also a few off direct 2 drive. Can't get over 150kb/sec from either service.  
 
Seems fishy. Bandwidth clocks normal but i'm getting super low speeds. Anyone know about this?

Oh man, I can tell you about the time I got my bandwith throttled...mmhmm...yeah...
 
Anyway, I don't know what to tell you other than call your ISP and yell at them. Maybe check your QoS settings on your router.

I had something like that happen to me once and it turned out the router had reset and synced to a much lower speed.  It still does it every so often, but the solution was to first check the router to confirm it, then reset it until it synced back to the proper speed. 
 
I guess what I'm saying is it might not be throttling and it could be sorted by a simple router reset.  I hope that helps but honestly I'm not the most knowledgeable person on this, so if you've already ruled that out just ignore me.  =)

All in the ToS if you read them. Find an ISP with true unlimited broadband. I'm on 20mpbs BE Unlimited here in the UK, one of the only ones who don't traffic shape or throttle. Used to be with BT as I didnt pay the bills so I had no choice, from 4pm till 12 it was unusable

All the time. 
 
Thanks a lot, Bell Canada, you bunch of asshole bell-ends.

no, not yet at least. i did hear about DSL now doing that but it never happened  to me.
 
it is pretty stupid for them to throttle it though.

I don't believe so. I don't use extreme amounts of data.

Sounds like you have a bad ISP.
 
How much are you paying and who do you have?
 
I have FiOS, so even if I would download an extreme amount they don't cap bandwidths for any reason.

30Mb Virgin Media
 
Line gets throttled if i exceed just under 10GB between 10am - 3pm or just under 5GB between 4pm - 9pm. 9pm onwards is fair game though, so if i have to download my steam back-catalog or something I'll just leave it running overnight.
 
Service is fine for me though, no bandwidth hard caps (to a degree) and its almost always pretty solid. Upload is pretty bad, but 3.8MBps down is fine with me.

When I was on DSL a few years ago, Bell used to throttle my connection if I downloaded more than usual.

I'm pretty sure Time Warner does it to me every night.

The best was the other night when my download speed was .2

yeah, comcast will throttle down my bandwidth if they see that i'm downloading too much. as a solution, i don't have more than one active download at a time and i don't seed torrents longer than i have to.

Nope.

Probably what's happening to my Internet.  some hours of the day it's just really bad, can't get over 50kb/s  on my 7mb line.  Usually clears up around midnight and i'm back to normal speed.

Some internet providers get faster and slower depending on the number of users using the service.

We only have shitty ISPs in our area, so yes. Always.