Cox Cable's Traffic Management Strategy

Light Reading published an article describing Cox Cable's strategies for traffic management. Cox's pilot approach divides traffic into "time-sensitive" (e.g., Web pages, voice calls, streaming videos, games), and "non-time-sensitive" (e.g., file uploads, peer-to-peer, and Usenet) categories. The system will delay the upstream, non-time-sensitive traffic when network congestion is detected. All traffic returns to normal when the congestion abates.

This is the right approach - classifying traffic by its response time requirements and delaying lower priority traffic during periods of congestion. This is a much more reasonable approach than the monthly usage caps that other operators are implementing.