• January 28, 2009

Internet service provider Cox Communications said Tuesday it will start testing a new traffic management system.

The company said that starting next month it will prioritize "time-sensitive" material like Web pages, voice calls, streaming videos and gaming, during periods of high congestion, but may delay what it considers less time-sensitive traffic, which it said included file uploads, peer-to-peer and Usenet newsgroups.

"These classifications are a result of our network engineering expertise and our customers' expectations," Cox said in a statement about the new system. "Customers surfing the Internet expect that web pages should load quickly, so requests for web pages should process rapidly, and therefore fall into the time-sensitive category. However, uploading a file to an FTP site would be minimally affected by a brief delay, so that's classified as non-time-sensitive."

Free Press policy director Ben Scott raised concerns about the new system. "Cox customers will certainly want to know more about how the company is peering into their Internet traffic, what criteria it uses to discriminate and whether this network management practice is more like a scalpel or a hammer," he said in a statement. "As a general rule, we're concerned about any cable or phone company picking winners and losers online. These kinds of practices cut against the fundamental neutrality of the open Internet. We urge the FCC to subject this practice to close scrutiny and call on Cox to provide its customers with more technical details about exactly what they are doing."--Wendy Davis