Interview with AT&T on BitTorrent Filtering

An anonymous reader writes "Slyck is running an interview with AT&T's Vice President of Legal Affairs, Jim Cicconi. AT&T discusses the latest in their effort to filter, however one interesting point tends to show they aren't moving anywhere until they discuss this with their customers. "We hear from our customers directly and indirectly. It's a very competitive business, ravenously so. I think our company is very, very sensitive to customer attitude — we have to consider this," Jim Cicconi told Slyck.com."

Hey slick

[Loki_1929]

Forget your customers, get your ass down to the local library and get your hands on the text of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act right NOW. You're opening yourself up to upwards of trillions in liability if your filtering doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time. You're also opening yourselves up to massive liability with the federal government (hint: take a quick look at Comcast vis-a-vis Bit Torrent).

Quit spending all day being a PR monkey and get back to being a lawyer for your company. You're giving bad advice that has the potential to obliterate your employer.

EDGE

[Mr. Underbridge]

"If someone is using a p2p network on a cell 24/7, it can adversely impact the service of their neighbors. It has the effect of not providing the service paid for. Overwhelming usage is from BitTorrent traffic. No one wants to get to the point [where] we say, "You can't do that."

Oh, now I get it. They think that's why EDGE is slow. Kind of cute in a retarded kind of way.

Do they think EV-DO users aren't using P2P or something? Perhaps if they upgraded the network instead of locking it down, it might work better for them.

No fuckin way!

[superash]

If someone is using a p2p network on a cell 24/7, it can adversely impact the service of their neighbors. It has the effect of not providing the service paid for.

WHAT?? Was it written in the ISP subscription forms that you are not supposed to use p2p? And if I use p2p network and the whole cell is affected then its fuckin time you upgraded the b/w of the cell!!!

It's like saying, "You are using a Microwave and a fridge, your neighbor cannot switch on the lights....so, you need to switch off your fridge". pah!

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[fahrbot-bot]

Even if a customer isn't using it at the moment, they won't be in favor of blocking it since they might want it in the future.

You're manking the assumption that customers are not stupid and short-sighted. AT&T will promise them a 50% discount for 3 months and they'll sign anything.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[zappepcs]

Although there is some sense to what you are suggesting, there is still one problem: Unlimited MEANS unlimited. If you sell users an unlimited plan, it is UNLIMITED. If you sell them that plan then decide that it is only unlimited for certain types of traffic packets, well, that is just not legal. If you buy a car, you have reasonable expectations that it will work on ALL highways. If you buy an unlimited Internet plan, you have reasonable expectations that it will work for all Internet protocol types and traffic.

If they want to sell a plan that does not permit P2P protocols, fine as long as that is what it says up front. If they want to sell a plan that only allows 10KB per month, no problem (good luck with that btw) and other such things. The trouble is that they sell unlimited plans, and their real problem is that they didn't think anyone would use the unlimited part. You know, customers get tired of trying to connect, so just don't use the service too much, then it's all good.

Now, if the reason for wanting to filter is ONLY to help the **AA and/or government types to find out things about you, well... burn the witches in hell I say. Better yet, switch services, let the shareholders burn them. I switched, as fast as I could when AT&T merged with Cingular. Do you need a daddy? AT&T wants to be your Ma Bell?

Competition?

[webmaster404]

It's a very competitive business

Oh I am sure there is loads of competition in the ISP business dominated by 4 businesses, that must be a ton of competition with Verizon, Time-Warner and Comcast all charging sky high rates for ISP service. Really, there's almost no competition in the ISP field there's the big 4 and some local ISPs and that is about it. Thats about the same as MS saying that the OS business is very competitive with only 1 major universal competitor which is Linux (Yes there is OS-X but it doesn't run on standard computers)

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[n6kuy]

Obviously you misunderstood what they mean by "discuss this with their customers".

Discuss, as in, "Oh, by the way, we're changing the terms of your service."

All Depends on How They Ask

[TechForensics]

You've never seen poll questions, have you? It all depends on how the question is phrased:

1) Should we (AT&T) slow down some kinds of uses you can make of your unlimited pipe; or

2) Should we throttle the bandwidth hogs who decrease the bandwidth available to YOU.

That's what leading questions are all about...

Re:Hey slick

[despe666]

I'm not worried about them, they'll just buy themselves another custom-made exception in Congress.

Re:lying

[LaughingCoder]

profits matter more than the customers

Except that AT&T also knows that without customers there can be no profit. So in that case, customers are all that matters. Hmmm, what we have here is a genuine conundrum. Maybe it's not quite as simplistic as you suggest. Maybe they really are considering their customers - even if it's for all the "wrong" reasons like making a profit and staying in business, rather than just "doing the right thing".

I hope this happens

[AlgorithMan]

The day that P2P Traffic gets filtered will be the day when anonymous P2P will finally catch on...
then - when everyone can download everything without any fear of being caught - the CD sales will finally become THAT bad, that the music industry MUST start thinking about making better offers OR die... anyhow the result will be that all these crazy lawsuit-waves and the evil legislation lobbying will FINALLY come to an end

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Anonymous Coward]

"more than your fair share"?

The company SOLD you a plan where you would be given upload and download transfer rates of a specific speed that is (if you go by their advertising) unlimited otherwise. This means if you're using your connection to it's maximum allowed rate all the time, you're technically getting EXACTLY what you paid for. EXACTLY your fair share. THEY are the ones overselling their network. Either they stop using "unlimited" as a buzzword in their advertising campaigns, or they start setting realistic transfer speeds that their network can handle. (Both methods would lose a lot of new customers unless their competition does the same.) That's the only way to "fix" this problem properly, -unless- they upgrade their network the way they were suppose to.

Passing the blame on to people who use "more than their fair share" is ignoring the REAL issues that are caused by the telcoms themselves.

I LOL'd

[stinerman]

It's a very competitive business, ravenously so

Yeah, 2.5 options make for a very competitive market. You (or other monopoly) own my phone lines, while my cable monopoly owns my cable lines. High-latency satellite connections, slow-ass dialup (still over the monopoly's lines, BTW), or "unlimited" (5GB cap) cell data plans are the rest of the .5 options.

I think a lot of businesses would be quite happy to have such an absence of competition in their markets.

Re:EDGE

[PopeRatzo]

"We will provide greater bandwidth and service for everyone and invest in upgrades to our networks if this bill passes and you approve of this monopoly franchise agreement"

First, agree to never give any sort of customer information to the government without a court order, then we can talk. Until then, AT&T, just stick to the agreements you've made with your customers. And if that agreement was "unlimited internet", don't whine about how much I use.

It's funny how deeply caring and concerned about customers AT&T is when they're getting ready to fuck them over. They didn't seem to care so much when they bent over and handed our data to law enforcement without a judge's order.

metered usage is the long term solution

[wakim1618]

There are several advantages to treating bankwidth like any other utility. Yes, your monthly charges will vary. So does your electricity bill and gas bill. But at the same time, this will provide pressure from consumers for software companies to declare how often their software calls home and how much bandwidth their application uses. In turn, this provides impetus for Congress to pass legislation whereby stealth phoning home will be illegal. Yeah, this last bit is probably wishful thinking. On the other hand, if you are uploading/downloading tons of stuff on p2p, then the costs of providing service to you probably exceeds what you are paying. Nevertheless, there is a large incentive for segmenting market between casual and heavy users.

Re:If True, Then Not Going To Happen

[edmicman]

But it doesn't just apply to "illegal" filesharing. More and more downloads are going to be handled via P2P protocols because of the bandwidth crunch that the ISPs have created for themselves. How many HD movie downloads via iTunes would it take to hit 160GB in a month? What about legal downloads of isos or movies via bittorrent? What about Joost streaming TV (or any streaming video technology) that makes use of P2P technologies?

Capping bandwidths and throttling users is very shortsighted - it's only going to put off the inevitable. The truth is that the ISPs have always oversold their bandwidth, and are now getting burned for it. The answer isn't to limit people's use - the solution is to build more bandwidth infrastructure!

Re:Not even close

[Nullav]

Because getting a $5 refund after a few years is really worth the trouble.

Re:Competition?

[pavera]

The answer is phone services have a huge barrier to entry. You need somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10 billion dollars to provide service (IE infrastructure, fiber, routers, etc) to all the homes in a single medium sized state. Multiply that by 50, and you need 250-500 billion dollars in capital to do the whole country.

Then, you have to convince/bribe/cajoul the politicians in each state/city to give you rights of way so you can lay your fiber. This is going to cost another 5-10 billion dollars country wide. Then you have to spend another 50-100 billion in marketing to steal customers away from the incumbents. Now, maybe, if you're lucky and your marketing worked, and the incubents didn't drop their prices by 50%, you have a revenue stream.

Once you have the infrastructure in place, adding MB of bandwidth is relatively cheap. This is why everyone hates the phone/cable companies, because they have no competition, but they could be providing much better services for the same we are paying now, but they dont' have to because there is not competition. If someone could magically lay a fiber network for cheap, they could destroy the incumbents. But the incumbents know this as well, and if someone did try to compete, they could just as easily drop their prices and keep customers from switching, causing the new provider to fail. They would then buy up the new providers assets at a bankruptcy fire sale, and then raise prices back up and not use the new assets to provide more services.

Re:For those who didn't RTFA...

[LordSnooty]

When we get 100 mbit fiber, it won't matter.

Hmm, but by then hi-def streaming video will be the norm. The needs of apps always expand to fill the available pipe.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[Jurily]

There is no such thing as "disproportionate bandwidth usage" in an unlimited plan. They sold it, but they don't want to deliver it.

Re:Liar, liar, pants on fire

[mozkill]

i totally agree. the first thing I noticed when reading this was the lie that "they care about what the customer thinks." . we all know they only care about profits and methods of getting leverage to raise fees.

But there are legal reasons for BitTorrent

[Orion Blastar]

Such as downloading Linux distros and free and open source software.

Some musicians, such as Michael David Crawford [geometricvisions.com] release their music in free OGG format with an open source license that allows it to be spread by BitTorrent.

Not only that but Joost [joost.com] and Miro [getmiro.com] are video players that use P2P and BitTorrent to share videos that are also released into the public domain, open source, and free licenses.

Like I said there are 100% legal reasons for using BitTorrent and P2P filesharing networks. This will hurt the free and open source market more than it cuts down on piracy. It is like giving commercial licenses a free pass and filtering or blocking the free and open source licenses. Some people write articles and howtos via Legal Torrents to promote their web sites in a free or open source license, as well as help out the community.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[petermgreen]

A user downloading a single large file during peak times at high speeds is going to create more of a bandwidth problem than a user downloading multiple large files via BT staggered over a couple of days
There are a couple of issues with this:

The first is that very few people download hundreds of megabytes per day from non P2P sources. Even if they do (for example a video on demand TV series) the content provider is likely to take steps to place the content close to the users (because it reduces thier costs as well as the users ISPs costs, see for example the BBC who peer with most if not all major UK ISPs) whereas with P2P bits of the files tend to come from all over the world.

The other issue is assuming a network that treats all packets equally a group of TCP connections competing for the line should end up with about equal bandwidth. So if you use a protocol that uses n TCP connections (I think bittorrent tends to use about 5 though it depends on configuration) at once to download a file you will end up with 5 times the bandwidth share as someone who is downloading using a conventional protocol that is based on a single TCP connection.

If your neighbor's network is going slower because you're downloading a huge file, that's not a sign of you being a 'bandwidth hog' - it's a sign of improper QoS policies in place.
One soloution is certainly a QOS system that limits bandwidth hogs to thier fair share while allowing normal users to have a normal bursty pattern. I think the main downside to that system is you really need to implement it at every level of the network as you can't be sure at what level of the network the pinch point will be.

In my opinion, it's just an excuse to try to maintain the old business models of cable TV (for cable companies) and cellphone/landline (for phone companies) when better alternatives (digital distribution/VoIP) exist.
With voip I agree with you but that isn't what this article is about. I would also agree with you if they tried to attack sanely implemented legitimate digital distribution of TV series but that isn't what this article is about either.

Distribution using tools like bittorrent is a network admins nightmare. There is little to no attempt made to keep traffic on cheap local links rather than expensive international ones. Multiple TCP connections are used for a single download making the protocol more agressive in it's use of bandwidth (see above) and the ISP dare not try and do anything to cache/optimise it because they know that the bulk of the traffic is illegal.

Re:For those who didn't RTFA...

[billcopc]

Not really.

Right now the pipe is artificially small, and has been for over a decade. In 1998 I remember having 3mbit symmetrical DSL for less than what I pay now for what is effectively half-duplex cable. Back in 98, my LAN was 10mbit, the internet was 30% of my line speed - today I'm nearing the end of gigabit's usable lifespan, waiting for the monkeys-that-be to crank out 100gbit ASAP (skip 10gig, too little too late). I'd probably be relatively happy with even just 30mbit symmetrical. I mean, I already have a fat 100mbit pipe on a server in Europe for not much more than my total cable bill here in Canada. It's not a dedicated line, but I really don't mind slowing to 40-50mbit during peak hours. Why can't we have that kind of juice over here, on what is supposed to be a wealthy continent ?

Lay down the goddamned fiber already. It will have to be done at some point, might as well do it now and lease me a chunk of it every month. Weak networking infrastructure is leaving us in the past.