AT&T Patents System To "Fast-Lane" File-Sharing Traffic

An anonymous reader writes Telecom giant AT&T has been awarded a patent for speeding up BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic, and reducing the impact that these transactions have on the speed of its network. Unauthorized file-sharing generates thousands of petabytes of downloads every month, sparking considerable concern among the ISP community due to its detrimental effect on network speeds. AT&T and its Intellectual Property team has targeted the issue in a positive manner, and has appealed for the new patent to create a 'fast lane' for BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic. As well as developing systems around the caching of local files, the ISP has proposed analyzing BitTorrent traffic to connect high-impact clients to peers who use fewer resources.

Comments

Re:Net Neutrality

[meta-monkey]

No. Treating traffic differently based on protocol is fine. It's called QoS, and that's all this is. Net Neutrality is about the source and destination of packets.

What they're doing is conflating the two to confuse people so they'll say "gee I guess some fast lanes are okay..." and give up on Net Neutrality when really all they agreed is that QoS is a good idea.