Comcast Beginning 'Net Neutrality' Testing

Comcast will begin testing what the cable concern has described as a "protocol agnostic" approach to managing bandwidth traffic during high-peak periods, Comcast said Tuesday. Selected customers in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and Warrenton, Virginia, are expected to receive e-mails on Wednesday highlighting the program. The 30-day tests are expected to begin Thursday. "Unless you are an extremely heavy user of Internet resources (which is not likely) you will not notice any change to your Internet experience during this test," Mitch Bowling, general manager of Comcast online services says in the e-mail. "At the busiest times of the day on our network (which could occur at any time), those very few disproportionately heavy users, who are doing things like conducting numerous or continuous large file transfers, may experience slightly longer response times for some online activities, until the period of network congestion ends." The move is designed to set aside complaints that the Philadelphia-based company has been throttling BitTorrent data and other peer-to-peer traffic to manage congestion. Comcast's practices have been the subject of hearings before the Federal Communications Commission, which is set to announce new rules concerning the concept of Network Neutrality.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/comcast-beginni.html