[Osiris]

Pandemic Options Include Crippling Home Modems

ComputerWorld says that the government, in cases of emergency, has the option of throttling your home internet connection or cutting off popular sites all together to ease congestion. You’d think the government would have more important stuff to do during a pandemic than throttling people’s net connections.

Although providers cannot identify users at the computer level to manage traffic from that point, two providers stated that if the residential Internet access network in a particular neighborhood was experiencing congestion, a provider could attempt to reduce congestion by reducing the amount of traffic that each user could send to and receive from his or her network. Such a reduction would require adjusting the configuration file within each customer's modem to temporarily reduce the maximum transmission speed that that modem was capable of performing-for example, by reducing its incoming capability from 7 Mbps to 1 Mbps.