Abstract: Systems and methods for regulating the throughput of a channel between a gateway and one or more subscriber terminals are disclosed. Various embodiments of the invention provide for monitoring link utilization between a gateway and a subscriber terminal at, for example, the physical layer of the OSI model. Based in part on the link utilization the link throughput may be throttled at a layer higher than, for example, the transport layer. Regulating may occur by advertising a decreased TCP window size or intelligently dropping packets. In another embodiment, a subscriber terminal may estimate the signal to noise ratio of a forward link channel and communicate this SNR to the gateway. The gateway may adjust the modulation and/or coding of the signal in response to the SNR. The gateway may also throttle deliver of packets in response to changes these changes in the modulation and/or coding of the signal.