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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