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Comcast, the country's second largest ISP, has announced that as of December 31st, 2008 it has ceased throttling BitTorrent users as requested by the FCC back in August of 2008. "Effective December 31, 2008, we have completed this transition, which is now part of our daily business operations for managing congestion on our network," reads an announcement on its website. "The approach is designed to ensure, to the greatest extent possible, that all of our high-speed Internet customers have fair and equal access to the Internet and to bandwidth resources." The FCC found Comcast in violation of the agency's principles for electively targeting and throttling the connection speeds of a single application - BitTorrent - as part of its overall efforts in managing network traffic. "Although Comcast asserts that its conduct is necessary to ease network congestion, we conclude that the company’s discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet and does not constitute reasonable network management," read its ruling. As past of its new congestion management practices, they've deployed new hardware and software close to the company's Regional Network Routers (RNRs). This hardware will flip a user from the standard "Priority Best-Effort" traffic (PBE) to lower quality of service (QoS) "Best-Effort" traffic (BE) for fifteen minutes if a subscriber surpasses a "User Consumption Threshold" of 70% of their upstream or downstream bandwidth bandwidth over a similar 15-minute period. Using more than 70% of your bandwidth for this duration is called an "Extended High Consumption State."
