Comcast has announced plans to implement a traffic management system that will allocate bandwidth according to use when networks are congested.NEW YORK
(Reuters)—Comcast Corp has provided U.S.
regulators details of how it plans to change the way it manages Web traffic
over its high speed Internet network without blocking any applications or
content.
The move comes after the Federal
Communications Commission voted last month to uphold a complaint that Comcast
had violated the regulator's open-Internet principles by hindering peer-to-peer
traffic from applications such as BitTorrent.
Comcast said on Friday that under the plan designed to give all users their
"fair share" of bandwidth it would focus on managing the traffic of
customers who are using most bandwidth when the network is congested.
It said it will use software on its network to determine if particular
subscribers have been the source of high volume of traffic and will temporarily
give traffic from those subscribers a lower priority status.
It said that when a subscriber's traffic is assigned a lower priority status
its traffic could be delayed if the network is congested but would not be
delayed if there is no congestion.
Comcast said it expect to have the new traffic management system in place
across its network by the end of December.
U.S. Internet service providers such as Comcast have been overwhelmed by the
rapid growth of online services including peer-to-peer applications as well as
online video, music downloading and photo-sharing, and are seeking ways to
cost-effectively avoid network congestion.
Comcast, which has more than 14 million high-speed Internet subscribers, had
previously said it was changing its network management practices to ensure all
Web traffic is treated essentially the same.
(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Anshuman Daga)
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