A long-term usage profile and a congestion state metric are used to determine QoS treatment to apply to packets corresponding to a given network user. A user's historical long-term use, measured over one or more periods of time, is used to generate a profile that is compared to one or more predetermined usage threshold level(s). If the usage profile, either singular or composite corresponding to whether one or more than one measurement is used respectively, exceeds the threshold(s), QoS treatment is applied to service flow bytes according to the comparison results during times of network channel congestion. Congestion metrics are determined based on a count of the number of bytes dropped during a congestion measurement window. Either the count itself or the count rate of change combined with the count are compared to a congestion threshold. If the measured/derived values exceed a congestion threshold, the channel is deemed congested.