[Kermit the Rabbid Frog]

While in a game the other night, some jackass sugested to everyone to type in console, "set rate 0", once that happened the latencey (ping) began to slowly increase?, Whatching everyone freak out because they could not get connected b/c ping was so high like from 52>800?.
So i tried it and I watched the console state "wrote to unamedsoldier.cfg file and it changed the line (( set rate = 30000 to 0)) in the Unamedsoldier.cfg file. What is this setting? Im thinking data tranfer rate??