How to improve your network performance by asking your provider for worse service
Radhika Mittal, Justine Sherry, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott J. Shenker · 2013
TCP's congestion control is deliberately "cautious", avoiding overloads by starting with a small initial window and then iteratively ramping up. As a result, it often takes flows several round-trip times to fully utilize the available bandwidth. In this paper we propose using several levels of lower priority service and a modified TCP behavior to achieve significantly improved flow completion times while preserving fairness.