AT&T Denies Resetting P2P Connections
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.'"
It's ironic that in America, the country that much of the basis for the Internet hails from, seems to be regressing in Internet access. In Eastern Europe, more and more people enjoy fast and unthrottled connections, and ISPs don't care how many gigabytes of traffic you pull in each month. One ISP I know in Romania helped alleviate demands on its network by setting up a DC++ server where people could share films and music with people from the same city, not by penalizing customers.
Unless you run a business class router and have configured it to log incoming RST packets, you haven't seen any resets in your router log because they are not logged.
The typical Linksys/Netgear/D-Link/whatever NAT "router" found in most homes most certainly won't log incoming RST packets.
Regards,
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*Art