The FCC yesterday issued its Order officially directing Comcast to stop using its current P2P-focused delaying technology to relieve network congestion. The company has until the end of the year to switch to a new throttling system that doesn't discriminate based on protocol, and Comcast is now offering more details about how it will do this. Heavy Comcast Internet users: prepare to be deprioritized.

Nothing about Comcast's proposed "protocol agnostic approach" is new; the company has talked it up for months and is already running trials of the technology in Virginia, Florida, and Colorado, testing various approaches and pieces of equipment. Many of the questions surrounding the approach remain unanswered, but Comcast has settled on a basic approach that will "deprioritize" the packets of the heaviest users during periods of network congestion.

Comcast Senior Vice President Mitch Bowling explained the idea to Bloomberg News yesterday, but offered no details except to say that the deprioritization would only drop perceived speeds to the level of a "really good DSL experience.” Interesting, but what does that mean, exactly?

We checked in with Comcast for more details and learned that protocol agnostic system currently being trialed works in a "dynamic and realtime" fashion, according to spokesperson Charlie Douglas. A user's history has nothing to do with it; when the network equipment detects a state approaching congestion, it identifies the heaviest current users of the system based on their last few minutes of use and then deprioritizes their packets for periods of between 10 and 20 minutes. Only total bandwidth is used to make the calculation, not the use of particular protocols apps or protocols.

While the consumer experience for these users will feel like a slowdown, Comcast stresses that it isn't changing the boot file in the modem. The user's connection to the central office will continue at it normal speeds, but packets sent to and from that user will be treated with a lower priority that could result in delays relative to other users on the network. As the company explains it, the speed of the connection will remain the same, but a customer's ability to access bandwidth will change.

Beyond that, questions remain to be sorted out, which is one of the main purposes of the trials. Douglas says that Comcast hasn't decided whether the "heavy users" will be chosen based on upload speeds, download speeds, or a combination of both. The same uncertainty surrounds the issue of whether the deprioritization will affect only packets going in a certain direction or all packets headed to/from a particular IP address.

20 percent of Comcast's network should be upgraded to the much faster DOCSIS 3.0 technology by the end of this year, and as the rollout continues, it may affect the way that Comcast runs its congestion system. DOCSIS 3.0 is far faster than existing technology, of course, which could relieve some of the last-mile congestion pressure that currently affects cable systems. Beyond the simple speed boost, though, DOCSIS 3.0 uses two cards in the central office, one for uploads and one for downloads. Older DOCSIS deployments used a single card for both, and Douglas says that the newer system provides more options for management.