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."

Don't shed a tier for me

[Dachannien]

My suggestion - though I'm not an AT&T customer - is to investigate the possibility of implementing tiered pricing as Time Warner is considering. If the problem with BitTorrent and other P2P apps (from your perspective, anyway) is disproportionate bandwidth usage, why not just charge more from the people using more than their fair share?

That is, unless the true motivation here is that you're deep in the pocket of the content cabal and will do anything to get whatever pittance of a kickback they're willing to give.

Does filtering really work?

[dattaway]

Many people on the dd-wrt forums would love to know how to do it. Its been tried on the L7 layer, but clients get around that in seconds.

I had AT&T's service

[Jewfro_Macabbi]

Now I've dropped them like a bad habit. Seriously - their service sucks. Those commercials you see advertising their "broadband" network where the guys in a pond with a laptop surfing at high speeds. Yeah - my ass. I'm happy with my new Alltel service. Now I can download at the speeds faster than AT&T's total connection... The first month I used AT&T's mobile broadband - I received a $5000 dollar bill. I called them - WTF? They explained that though they had added unlimited net access to my account - they'd forgotten to take of the per MB charge - but they will fix it. The next month - a $15000 dollar bill - and the same rigamarole. Next month - a $34,000 dollar bill. At this point they disconnected my service for non-payment. I'll admit that lasted all of thirty seconds after calling them. It took 5 months for them to correct my bill.

Re:Does filtering really work?

[Artefacto]

I'm not sure how they do it, but my ISP (netcabo, Portugal) is able to throttle bittorrent traffic even when the most strict encryption options are selected. They must be using good techniques to recognise bittorrent traffic in particular, because they're not able to throttle the encrypted protocols used by eMule. The method is so agressive that when it's in "throttle mode" other protocols may also be affected. It's also not mere passive throttling, they actually send false RST packages to your peers, so you can't keep a connection for long (talk about man-in-the-middle attacks...) And they don't acknowledge any of this ("p2p traffic speed is influenced by many factors" is the usual line) unless you get very deep in the support chain. There's no official position on this matter whatsoever.

Re:Don't shed a tier for me

[boyko.at.netqos]

Well, the problem is that charging for the data isn't going to do anything to resolve bandwidth issues. 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. It's because data isn't the limited resource - data is unlimited. It's bandwidth - the capacity of the pipe at any particular time which is limited.

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. Everybody gets a share of the pipe. If you want a bigger share of that pipe, you can ALREADY pay for more bandwidth, which is the limited resource. Charging for bandwidth AND data is "double dipping [networkper...edaily.com]"

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.

For those who didn't RTFA...

[SanityInAnarchy]

For those who didn't RTFA, here's the relevant quote:

Were focusing on pirated content over BitTorrent, [not BitTorrent per se.]

Hey, hint, to anyone who thinks this is a legitimate position: That is like saying you're focusing on stopping pornography, not web traffic per se. It doesn't work that way; even when you know what you want to block by domain (myspace.com), you'll be foiled by high school students (and proxies).

And that said, most ISPs are having a hard enough time blocking BitTorrent at all, much less trying to filter specific uses. The sooner you give up trying to filter stuff that your users don't want filtered, the sooner you can focus on a long-term solution that will actually work, like upgrading your network.

On DSL, it bothers me when my housemates use YouTube, and I occasionally try to throttle them, for that reason. When we get 100 mbit fiber, it won't matter.

The problem is...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that most people who will hate this will be in the middle of multi-year contracts. AT&T will not see a lot of people cancelling at first.

If, by the time your contract is up, every ISP is filtering, you'll be screwed.

Anyone who filterws your traffic is not an ISP. If they call themselves that, it's fraud.

Andy

Re:metered usage is the long term solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with metered usage is that it isn't what their current subscribers already agreed to. If a customer that does a lot of illegal p2p is only offered to be switched over to metered service by AT&T, he will immediately find a new provider. This may be what AT&T wants because the user is not profitable under the old scheme, but even customers that don't use much bandwidth will cancel as well because they are afraid of that $15,000 bill. AT&T has identified itself as a victim of illegal activity on the internet because p2p raises the average bandwidth consumed by each subscriber. The amount of bandwidth they can sell over their capacity is reduced and there are less profits to show for it.

Now AT&T feels that it is justifiable to stop data transfers that are illegal, and has financial incentive to do so. So there is only the technical problem in identifying illegal content on the network. A subcriber being blocked in this manner is more likely to stay with AT&T than one forced into a new payment plan.