Slashdot Mirror
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.
I can say that they never reset conne
I'm on AT&T, and I use P2P about once a week, and I've never seen any resets in my router log.
No! No! We are not screwing our customers to maximize profits!
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.
The Long Now Foundation
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.
No and Vuze was quite up-front about the study, they basically measured the number of RST messages and divided by the number of network connections. The numbers weren't intended to be accurate but rather to give an indication of realevive trends.
For example,
37 users on Telecom Italia France using ASN 12876 experienced a median of 2.53% RST messages;
27 users on AT&T WorldNet Services using ASN 6478 experienced 13.97% RST messages;
24 users on AT&T WorldNet Services using ASN 7018 experienced 5.35% RST measages;
40 users on Comcast Cable using ASN 33668 experienced 23.72% RST messages.
One thing you have to remember is the forged RST packets is a man-in-the-middle-attack, the Vuze plugin connected on a AT&T connection doesn' know if the RST came from AT&T at ASN 6478 , AT&T at ASN 7018, Comcast or Telecom Italia France.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Then i guess their network just sux.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
TCP resets can occur for many reasons. All that client software can know and report is that the TCP reset occurred. But, for example, it can't know whether it got a reset because the software on the other end of the connection crashed, or had a bug, or the computer was turned off, or there was some corrupted communications between the two causing the TCP connection to get confused and need to be reset. This is all explained at http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_TCPConnectionManagementandProblemHandlingtheConnec.htm (for example).
Vuze's test only counted reset rates, so it can't prove anything about what's going on. At most, it could suggest areas where it might be productive to do more investigation.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!