On Monday we reported that Cox was preparing to trial congestion management techniques in its Kansas and Arkansas markets. Less than a week later, we’re receiving word that Cox may be up to more than throttling traffic.

Icrontic reader Samuel Devoran tells us that Cox Communications may be outrightly filtering select protocols:

Legal bit torrent no longer works at all through Cox Communications. I started a legal download 7 hours ago. So far no data has transferred. Just to be sure I found several other heavily seeded legal torrents to test. Not one single byte of data has come through. Uploading is also dead in the water. As someone involved with web development this is a major, major problem. Uploading and downloading from SVN, Sourceforge, Apt repositories and YaST repositories (at least) has been completely crippled.

What Cox has done is not throttling. Cox has completely shut down bit torrent traffic, at least for the time being here in Northwest Arkansas. The WalMart Headquarters is only a mile away. At least WalMart will be affected as well, but they can just throw piles of money at the problem. This is one hell of a start to Cox’s new “throttling” policy: No bandwidth for developers..

Can other users from Arkansas or Kansas weigh in on Mr. Devoran’s experience? Is your traffic being filtered?

UPDATE @ 3:18 PM EST:

Vuze has joined the internet watchdog group Free Press in petitioning the FCC for scrutiny over Cox Communication’s new management policies.

Vuze General Counsel Jay Monahan has taken issue with the new system, and says that Vuze is being treated like a “second class” citizen. “It would appear that under the new Cox regime YouTube and Hulu (and of course Cox services) are high priority, while Vuze’s similar services are relegated to the back of the bus,” he said. “We join Free Press and others in calling for close scrutiny by the FCC of Cox’s activities affecting peer-to-peer traffic.”

Their claim may stand on some ground, as the brouhaha over Comcast’s past indescretion prompted the FCC to demand that all congestion management techniques be open for review. As of yet, no public information has been released regarding Cox’s approach to their new policy.