Comcast, the largest Internet service provider in the United States, said it hasn’t decided yet how to solve the problem of network congestion. On Wednesday, the company said it considers implementing a new management system called Fair Share. The main idea of the new system is that the speed of heavy traffic users will be limited for a short amount of time and they will be charged extra for using more bandwidth than the network’s “moderate” users.

Comcast has been making efforts to come up with new ways of traffic management after a report from The Associated Press news agency which revealed the fact that the Internet services provider was slowing BitTorrent P2P (peer-to-peer) traffic in order to avoid network congestions. The report exploded on the Internet’s blogosphere and news Web sites and eventually snowballed into a sanction from the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC voted 3-2 to forbid broadband providers from doing what Comcast did - obstruct peer-to-peer applications (Bittorrent, Acquisition).

As for Comcast, the FCC did not fine the Internet provider but ordered it to cease using its "unreasonable network management practices" until the end of the year and make public all its traffic management ways within 30 days.

Comcast has been trying to develop a viable set of network management techniques since June according to company spokesman Charlie Douglas. So far, the leading option is Fair Share. When heavy bandwidth users are detected, the new system would reduce their speed for about 10 to 20 minutes depending on how quickly the congestion problem is resolved, all for the sake of the other users and their smooth web surfing.