Last year Comcast faced an FCC investigation and endless media scrutiny for their decision to use packet forgery to throttle upstream P2P for all users. Cox dodged much of that media attention despite the fact they were busy doing roughly the same thing. That's in part because nobody noticed what Cox was doing (well, almost anybody). But it's also because unlike Comcast, Cox didn't lie about what they were up to when asked about it.

Things of course have changed a lot since last year, with Comcast employing a new network management system that instead of throttling all P2P users, temporarily throttles only the highest consumption users on the most congested nodes. Cox too quietly backed off their upstream throttling and packet forgery approach, and instead began testing a network management system in Kansas and Arkansas that throttled only applications Cox somewhat arbitrarily declared to be "non-time sensitive" (like P2P or software updates).

We will continue to explore ways to manage occasional congestion on the network but will not conduct a market trial of any techniques without first updating these Congestion Management FAQs. -Cox

Cox today updated their network congestion FAQ to indicate that they have concluded their application-specific throttling trial, and have decided not to implement the system nationally. No test results were shared.

"We’re conducting our final engineering analysis of the data gathered during the trial period," says the company. "We do not plan to further deploy this method at this time." "We will continue to explore ways to manage occasional congestion on the network but will not conduct a market trial of any techniques without first updating these Congestion Management FAQs."

Why isn't Cox moving forward with the trial? For one, network management hardware from companies like Sandvine is getting more sophisticated, allowing for specific congestion targeting that makes targeting by application a little like using a dull knife. Cox may also want to wait until the FCC finishes crafting their planned network neutrality rules before moving forward with any specific network management plan.

The FCC's new network neutrality push is primarily aimed at beefing up the FCC's legal authority in instances of extreme anti-competitive behavior, given Comcast's challenging the FCC's authority in court. Despite carrier fears, it's highly unlikely that the new rules will prohibit companies like Cox or Comcast from employing largely invisible throttling systems that specifically target extremely heavy users on heavily congested nodes.

It's far more likely that the rules won't look kindly upon throttling systems that target specific applications. Cox does employ caps for most of their tiers, though they aren't always enforced (aka "soft caps").