AT&T Plays Innocent to P2P Traffic Shaping Accusations

The subject of peer-to-peer “traffic shaping” is hot as ever. In a comment made on Friday AT&T declared to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it did not attempt to throttle back p2p traffic by generating commands to slow down file transfers, as Vuze said it can prove.

As we informed you last week ,Vuze, an application based on the peer-to-peer Azureus BitTorrent protocol, is determined to expose the interference with the p2p traffic that that the networks of the eight biggest broadband providers—among which AT&T—practice on a regular basis and in this respect it submitted its study to the FCC.

“At a minimum, more investigation is required to determine whether these resets are happening in the ordinary course of business or whether they are the kind of throttling practices which target specific applications and/or protocols” to the detriment of P2P users, Vuze stated.

In defense AT&T vice president of Internet and network systems research Charles Kalmanek, has sent a letter to Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa, saying that p2p resets can be the consequences of different local network events, such as outages, attacks, reconfigurations or overall trends in Internet usage.

“AT&T does not use ‘false reset messages’ to manage its network,” continued Kalmanek.

He also rendered Vuze action as unfounded and misleading and suggested that industry forums like the Distributed Computing Industry Association would be more indicated for a fair debate.

On the other hand Comcast, unlike AT&T, has admitted messing with P2P upstream traffic to avoid losing bandwidth but has finally promised to behave and change its policy by the end of this year.

The FCC is currently looking into the matter to see if the operator’s bandwidth management practices have been fair. Chairman Kevin Martin condemned these practices and called them “blunt means to reduce peer-to-peer traffic.”