Back in the early 2000's, I worked for a small company that was hired by the law firm representing …

Back in the early 2000's, I worked for a small company that was hired by the law firm representing one of the big cable companies (let's call them Company A). Company A was suing another big cable company (Company X) b/c A claimed that X was throttling customers without telling them and advertising what were in effect unthrottled bandwidth numbers. In order to prove this, the company I worked for went out and hired people to get cable modem subscriptions for Company X, install desktop that were locked down so the people couldn't use the desktops themselves and then collected ping and HTTP request data for months. My job was to take that data and analyze it for throttling patterns. This was my first job out of grad school and involved lots of: - data cleaning and organizing using Perl - analyzing statistics using Excel - creating charts that could then be shown to the lawyers and in turn could be used in court I didn't know much about databases or stats packages in Perl which, in hindsight, would have made my life easier. …