Last month, the FCC officially ruled that Comcast acted unlawfully and dishonestly when they decided to throttle peer-to-peer traffic from applications such as BitTorrent. The giant Internet provider was then ordered to amend its network management and disclose any future plans on this matter.
While Comcast is currently appealing that ruling, they sill decided to come clean over the weekend, detailing how it targeted peer-to-peer traffic (despite repeatedly denying it) and unveiling their new "fair share" plan to ensure the equal distribution of bandwidth to all subscribers.
According to the company, their new method of managing traffic does not block applications and it is instead based on customer priority. In a nutshell, during high volume traffic periods, the software will determine which subscribers are using the most bandwidth and temporarily slow down their connections. Comcast says that, on average, less than 1 percent of its high speed Internet subscribers will be affected by this protocol-agnostic congestion management technique.