Comcast Traffic Management (Score 1)

It's a common practice in networking to allow burst of data at a higher rate than can be sustained for a long period. Years ago frame relay had the concept of a Committed Information Rate and a Burst Size. The customer was promised the full CIR for the long term but could burst several hundred megabytes at wire rate. Today bursting is commonly controlled with a leaky bucket algorithm where a steady flow of tokens represents the allowable steady state rate but you can burst really fast until the bucket empties. The benefit of this approach is that it speeds up interactive traffic compared to long file transfers. If it takes more than a coffee break for something to happen, then taking a little longer won't hurt, but it's really painful when interactive applications slow down. If I had a choice between making speeding up one person's multi-gigabyte movie file transfer or speeding up everyone's interactive work, I'd rather speed up the interactive. Of course, I'd rather have instant everything for zero cost and a million dollar a month salary, but I can't figure out how to get that.