As part of the sanction by the FCC for its package hijacking of BitTorrent traffic, Comcast was ordered to file a new network management plan with the FCC by midnight Friday. Comcast complied with the order and announced that it would use bandwidth throttling a new congestion management technique as its new network management plan:
It will identify which customer accounts are using the greatest amounts of bandwidth and their Internet traffic will be temporarily managed until the period of congestion passes. Customers will still be able to do anything they want to online, and many activities will be unaffected, but managed customers could experience things like: longer times to download or upload files, surfing the Web may seem somewhat slower, or playing games online may seem somewhat sluggish.
This protocol-agnostic bandwidth throttling plan is expected to be deployed nationwide by the end of December 2008. With its 250GB cap set to go live in October and now bandwidth throttling on tap for December, it looks like we will not be having a Comcastic Day.
