Abstract In this paper, we present a novel bandwidth management scheme that we call adaptive bandwidth binning (ABB). ABB is presented in the context of a DOCSIS cable network, but it has obvious applicability to downstream service on any shared medium access network in which all downstream traffic is scheduled by a single headend device such as a CMTS or wireless base station or access point. ABB is capable of providing approximate weighted max-min fair sharing of downstream bandwidth via a low-overhead scheduler that requires only a small number of permanently allocated queues. A modern delay-based active queue management (AQM) technique is employed to control delays. The performance of ABB is evaluated via ns-2 simulations in which workloads include FTP, HTTP-based adaptive streaming (HAS), and web traffic targeted for different tiered service quality levels. Our results show that ABB is able to provide approximate weighted max-min fair bandwidth allocation among responsive high bandwidth flows while isolating them from low bandwidth and latency sensitive flows. The use of CoDel in each ABB queue is effective in managing latency as required. The use of flow weights in ABB supports service tiering in which subscribers pay more for higher service rates.