Editor’s Note: Cox today announced a bandwidth management policy similar to NetEqualizer, but with a twist. It seems they are only delaying p2p during times of congestion (similar to NetEqualizer), but in order to specifically determine traffic is p2p, they are possibly employing some form of Deep Packet Inspection (not similar to NetEqualizer, which is traffic-type agnostic). If anybody has inside knowledge, we would appreciate comments here and will make corrections to our assertion if needed.

As this all plays out, it will be interesting to see how they differentiate p2p from video and if they are actually doing Deep Packet Inspection.  Also, if DPI is part of the Cox strategy, how will this sit with the FCC when they clearly strong armed  Comcast to stop using DPI ?

Cox Will Shape Its Broadband Traffic; Delay P2P & FTP Transfers

Om Malik | Gigaom.com | Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Cox Communications, the third largest cable company and broadband service provider is joining Comcast in traffic shaping and delaying traffic it thinks is not time sensitive. They call it congestion management, making it seem like a innocuous practice, though in reality it is anything but innocous. Chalk this up as yet-another-incumbent-behaving-badly!

To be fair, in the past Cox had made it pretty clear that it was going to play god with traffic flowing through its pipes. Next month, they will start testing a new method of managing traffic on its network in Kansas and Arkansas. Cox, outlining the congestion management policy on their website notes:

“…automatically ensures that all time-sensitive Internet traffic — such as web pages, voice calls, streaming videos and gaming — moves without delay. Less time-sensitive traffic, such as file uploads, peer-to-peer and Usenet newsgroups, may be delayed momentarily — but only when the local network is congested.”

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