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AT&T Denies Resetting P2P Connections

Posted by Soulskill on from the it-was-the-one-armed-isp dept.

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.'"

3 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. no reset for me by p51d007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm on AT&T, and I use P2P about once a week, and I've never seen any resets in my router log.

  2. Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Any chance that the reset packets could be sent from someone else? If AT&T can send a reset packet that looks like it's from the person on BT you are communicating with, what's to stop other users from sending a similar packet. If I was on AT&Ts network, could I forge a packet that looks at though it was from another IP Address? Sure I couldn't get a response back, but I would only be sending out reset packets, and wouldn't want any ACK back for my bogus reset.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  3. Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban by emilper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, they have ... once or twice a year you hear about raids by ORDA (Rumanian Intellectual Property Rights Office), networking equipment confiscated and hefty fines paid. Quite the same rate as in US, considering that Rumania is only 22 mil.

    What is different: real competition in the market. About half of the home connections are managed by small companies with a few thousand to some ten thousand customers, and the rest is split between three big guys with cable connections and three with wireless connections, one of which is the former state telecom company. Competition is so big that you can have at least four or five offers at the same time in the same location: Romtelecom, one EVDO/CDMA network with reasonable bandwidth, two G3 networks I never used but heard good things about quality of service, one of the big cable tv companies (there are two, but they avoid competing with each other) and at least one of small companies.

    The small companies usually have bittorent trackers and DC++ hubs. I think they can afford to pay the fines, but cannot afford to lose customers.