Cox completes upstream Internet congestion test

Instead of lashing out at competitors, Cox is taking steps towards working with the and its FCC's net neutrality drive as it finishes up an eight-month bandwidth management test in its Kansas/Arkansas market. Although Cox would say little other than that it's "analyzing data from the trial," it will be submitting the results to the FCC. The MSO has stopped managing the Internet traffic traveling on its network based application and has no immediate initiative to use the congestion management system.  

Julius Genachowski in September proposed a set of network neutrality elements that would prevent service providers such as Cox or Verizon from throttling down the speed of specific content or applications, but would let the service providers conduct "reasonable" network management. Other service providers and congressional leaders argue that the proposed network neutrality rules, which Genachowski says will be initiated into a rulemaking action at the FCC's public meeting next week, are too intrusive and will prevent ongoing network investments.  

Applied only to its residential broadband upstream Internet traffic, Cox placed its web traffic into two main categories: time-sensitive (Web pages, voice calls and streaming video) and less time-sensitive (file uploads and peer-to-peer file transfers). During the test, Cox said the system would "momentarily" delay less-sensitive traffic if the network was congested.  

For more:
- Multichannel News has this article

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