Comcast, the US largest residential Internet provider, said on Thursday that it would take a more equitable approach toward managing the ever-expanding flow of Web traffic on its network. The cable company, based in Philadelphia, has been under relentless pressure from the Federal Communications Commission and public interest groups after media reports last year that it was blocking some Internet traffic of customers who used online software based on the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol. Comcast said it would change its fundamental approach to playing Internet traffic cop. Instead of interfering with specific online applications, it will manage traffic by slowing the Internet speeds of its most bandwidth-hogging users when traffic is busiest. “In the event of congestion, the half percent of people who are overutilizing an excessive amount of capacity will be slowed down subtly until capacity is restored,” the chief technology officer for Comcast, Tony G. Werner, said. “For the other 99.5 percent, their performance will be maintained exactly as they expect it.” Mr. Werner said he hoped to have the new system in place by the end of the year.

The change was part of an announcement by Comcast on Thursday that it had been working with BitTorrent, a company that was co-founded by the creator of the BitTorrent protocol. The start-up, based in San Francisco and supported by venture capital, helps media companies deliver their files over the Internet using BitTorrent technology. Consumers also use the protocol to share large files like movies. The companies said they have been working together for the last year on ways to optimize BitTorrent applications for the Comcast network. They said they would publish their findings to Web forums and standards groups so that other software makers, peer-to-peer services and I.S.P.’s could adopt them. “What we really want is not only for Comcast to be a better network but for all networks to be better,” the president of BitTorrent, Ashwin Navin, said. I see the lights at the end of the tunnel…

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