AT&T Denies Resetting P2P Connections 112
betaville points out comments AT&T filed with the FCC in which they denied throttling traffic by resetting P2P file-sharing connections. Earlier this week, a study published by the Vuze team found AT&T to have the 25th highest (13th highest if extra Comcast networks are excluded) median reset rate among the sampled networks. In the past, AT&T has defended Comcast's throttling practices, and said it wants to monitor its network traffic for IP violations.
"AT&T vice president of Internet and network systems research Charles Kalmanek, in a letter addressed to Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa, said that peer-to-peer resets can arise from numerous local network events, including outages, attacks, reconfigurations or overall trends in Internet usage. 'AT&T does not use "false reset messages" to manage its network,' Kalmanek said in the letter. Kalmanek noted that Vuze's analysis said the test 'cannot conclude definitively that any particular network operator is engaging in artificial or false [reset] packet behavior.'"
Confirmed? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm less worried about Middle Eastern terrorists. (Score:1, Insightful)
Denial (Score:5, Insightful)
Basic principle of greed you try to do as much that is legally and ethically grey; and then deny it until you are finally dragged kicking and screaming into court.
Blame Canada, hackers and trends :-) (Score:3, Insightful)
provide a better means for addressing such questions."
That the computer worlds version of a closed door human rights meeting for despots and dictators?
Just tell your consumers the truth Charles, you missed a decade of upgrades.
Why consumer ISP's manage their networks (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason that ISP's are starting to manage traffic it is due to capacity issues - changes in user behavior (e.g. viewing high quality video online, p2p) dramatically increase the bandwidth consumption per user, causing demand to exceed available bandwidth.
Given that demand exceeds current supply, and expanding capacity is time consuming and expensive, some ISP's appear to be managing traffic in a protocol-specific way (i.e. deliver time-sensitive VOIP traffic before HTTP page views before P2P seeding), and others appear to be managing traffic in a protocol-agnostic way.
Of course, many ISP's are building out to have capacity that exceeds demand. This is expensive and time consuming (e.g. Comcast has started deploying DOCSIS 3.0, but it'll take years and billions of dollars to upgrade everyone, Verizon has been rolling out fiber to the home, but again it'll be years and billions of dollars before fiber can completely replace DSL). And, in lower population density areas, or parts of the world where people can't pay much for broadband, the cost of providing more capacity exceeds what people are willing to pay, so traffic shaping is the only viable answer.
I've seen some people say "They sold me X bandwidth, and now they're not delivering it". They're confusing two very different types of bandwidth, capped and committed.
Capped bandwidth is cheap, because there are no guarantees other than that you won't get more than a certain amount. This is what home users generally buy. So if you read your ISP's terms, they probably are very clear that you're getting "up to X" performance, but with no committed performance, or even availability. For this, you might pay $60/month for 20 Mbps, or $3/Mbps.
Committed bandwidth is expensive, because the ISP reserves resources so that you can always get all the bandwidth that you're paying for, with financial penalties to the ISP for slowdowns or outages. For this, you might pay $359/month for a T1 line giving you 1.5 Mbps, or $239/Mbps.
What this means is that if you pay for capped bandwidth, you're making the choice of saving a lot of money by buying unreliable bandwidth. If you really, really want committed bandwidth, you can do what web sites and businesses do, and pay for committed bandwidth.
Re:Why consumer ISP's manage their networks (Score:3, Insightful)