Philadelphia - Comcast (NASD: CMCSA), the nation's largest cable TV company and a provider of broadband service to 14 million subscribers, has begun testing what it says is a "protocol agnostic" tool to manage its subscribers' bandwidth usage during peak traffic periods. The company recently came under fire after it was discovered to have been throttling the BitTorrent traffic of some of its users, which led to fallout including an FCC investigation and several public hearings.

Comcast has since said it planned to launch a protocol agnostic tool to manage traffic -- which in theory would not single out BitTorrent traffic -- and even said it teamed with the developers of BitTorrent to create the new bandwidth management tool.

The new system will be given a 30-day test with certain subscribers in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

"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, writes in an e-mail to subscribers affected by the service posted at Wired.com.

"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."

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http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/comcast-beginni.html