Cox has announced that their customers will now be seeing the "Powerboost" technology that Comcast customers have been cheering about since last summer. The new feature is available in Cox's Northern Virginia system today and will be launched in Cox markets across the country "on a market-by-market basis," according to the cable provider. Northern Virginia continues to be one of the nation's most competitive markets.

Powerboost delivers an additional chunk of bandwidth during the first quarter or half of a significant download -- provided network capacity is available -- after which the speed is throttled back to your regular capped speed. The service is designed to please users who occasionally grab large files and is less useful for p2p users eager for sustained throughput.

According to Cox, speeds will be boosted up to twice as fast for Cox Preferred package customers, while Premier customers will see boosts of up to 33%. There's some initial speed test results in our Cox forum, where some users already report speeds as high as 19203kbps. Some Comcast users have seen speeds as high as 64,000kbps.

While the system does not offer increased upstream speeds, Comcast has left the possibility open. "Right now our customers say our current upstream speeds meet their needs," a Comcast spokesperson recently stated. "But we'll continue to monitor what our customers want, and PowerBoost for uploads could be something we offer later."

As it stands, Powerboost gives Cox and Comcast some marketing fodder to help compete with Fios while they slog toward deployment of DOCSIS 3.0, which will offer downstream data rates of 160 Mbps or higher and upstream data rates of 120 Mbps or higher (per channel).