AT&T tells the FCC it'll cut off wireless P2P users
By Donald Melanson 
posted July 30th 2008 12:39PM
posted July 30th 2008 12:39PM
It looks like the FCC's investigation into Comcast's questionable traffic management is turning up a number of interesting details, the latest of which comes from AT&T's Robert Quinn, who told FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell that, "use of a P2P file sharing application would constitute a material breach of contract for which the user's service could be terminated." Quinn was apparently quick to add, however, that AT&T hasn't yet kicked anyone off the network for using P2P. Still, Commissioner McDowell apparently intends to use AT&T's statement to argue against the FCC's forthcoming order that contends Comcast secretly downgraded P2P traffic, saying that Comcast's throttling of traffic isn't as bad as AT&T blocking it all together. The merits of that argument aside, as TechDirt points out, given that AT&T's beef with P2P is that it makes use of "continuous (rather than bursty) transmissions at high data rates," their position does open up a number of interesting questions about streaming apps like Pandora, which are similarly data-intensive but, last we checked, still working just fine on AT&T's network.[Via Tech Dirt]
yeah,
If he gets elected you can expect your internet connection to come to a crawl from Net Neutrality!
What incentive does any ISP have for providing a high speed connection and upgrading it's network if it has no way of maintaining a consistent and fair bandwidth available to all users.
Actually Time Warner does care, since they are the ones already experimenting with pay per data cable internet down in Texas...
and not that I could agree with kjb434 on anything, but the only "hope" I have when Obama gets elected is the hope I can find a job as an expat somewhere outside of the US for the next four years. That guy is so full of shit I don't know how people can take him seriously - without a prepared speech he's a zero.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/#open-internet
@7on
Oh yeah, I bet that part Obama's website will get deleted when he doesn't find it convenient, just like his viewpoint on the surge in Iraq that has worked:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/07/obama-surge.html
You should also think about his viewpoints on the economy before you even begin to worry about net neutrality. Because let's face it, renegotiate NAFTA? Raise taxes when the economy is headed towards a recession? Are you serious? I mean, take an economics course...
@kjb434 You act as if banning certain protocols is the only way to stop users from consuming all available bandwidth. There are other options, such as QoS which can prioritize traffic rather than outright banning it and split available bandwidth among active users.
Net Neutrality won't kill the internet, but the ISP's poor management will.
If my life was so sad that I was upset I couldn't use a damn P2P app through my cell phone service, I believe I'd turn emo, cut myself for a couple months, blog about suicide, then when I finally decided to make the final 'cut', I'd suddenly have a premonition that life wasn't so bad, and get back on the right track..............
then get hit by a bus while crossing the street.
Because if you use voip, and watch tv shows through p2p these companies lose money, so they block it, to force you into their services. Its monopolizing the service. I bet comcast blocks all voip except its own before its all said and done
The legitimate uses of torrents are minuscule compared to the illegal.
I despise AT&T in every way possible, but for a wireless network .. I cant blame them for doing this.
I concur...the biggest fear though is the "slippery slope" argument - that once they are allowed to block P2P for wireless that it will allow for a precedent to block other types of traffic.
You're absolutely right about the amount of legal P2P traffic, but luckily, that's not how you get to argue the law.
It's a legal technology. It's just sharing. People using it illegally does not make the technology legal.
People are legally-sharing illegal goods.
That makes sense. Sort of. Right? I don't know.
i wonder if there are any penalties beyond cutting of your service. this might be an easy way to get out of a long-term contract with at&t
There's this thing I use a lot called "Xbox Live". It requires almost, if not all, of my bandwidth. I use this "Xbox Live" a lot.
This is just stupid. I am constantly downloading Halo montages, watching YouTube, watching other random streaming sites, and sometimes I leave it on overnight. A lot of times, I will download 1gb+ Demos from Xbox Live overnight. So, am I going to have to start pausing it every few minutes and waiting so that they don't think I'm using a P2P program?
The article is about ATT's wireless (cellphone) network not DSL. You should stop playing games and read a book instead to improve your reading comprehension.
First of all, they can tell whether you're using Xbox Live or P2P by the protocol data is being transferred over. Second, 1 GB overnight is nothing; I've downloaded 18 GB in less than 12 hours during the day, and I wasn't even using P2P. P2P makes it very easy to max out your bandwidth and I doubt that Xbox Live is affecting other's bandwidth.
The thing that concerns ISP's about P2P is the upload bandwidth that is used. Upload bandwidth is technology limited in most cases.
Torrents help me bypass the middle man (or men), be it going across the world to get a video from a guy I don't know, who just happened to record my fav show in h.264 format for my viewing pleasure or getting some old games that I don't want to pay $$$ for because it's an OLD game and I wouldn't buy it if I saw it in a store and that was my only option.
Suffice to say, I pay for my 15 Mbps bandwidth to use at my discretion. If companies are worried people will be using it all at the same time, then figure out a way to upgrade your machines to handle it. Isn't that what I'm paying you for?
Good god, read the fucking article you people!!! It's talking about WIRELESS (say what?) WIRELESS!!! Not your run of the mill DSL at home. WIRELESS.
Exactly. Like I don't get USA or FX in HD. But I have shows that I want to watch in HD. So I need to download them in HD. Or what about when the DVR fails and you lose half the show? You need to download it.
Let's just put it this way - People who make these decisions are morons. AT&T's management are a bunch of morons. Plain and Simple. We find a way around it, we adapt. Just like DRM, it will be cracked. They block Bittorrent, so we change the packets or we just retaliate.
Anyway - its not like anyone who would actually try to use P2P from a 3G card, would they?
@Dead_Rebel
My bad, in my rant I just ignored the "wireless" part of the article and was thinking about ISPs that do this.
My argument still applies to ATnT and any other company that would think of doing this. If you are worried about P2P clogging your 3G wireless network they should figure out ways to upgrade it with the revenue they receive and not limit users to make it appear functional.
You mean i cant use WinMobile Torrent anymore?
(Awesome program btw)
http://www.adisasta.com/wmTorrent.html
I've used P2P on my cell phone since the day I got it. Yes, it is that useful.
This is not about internet on phones but mobile broadband cards in laptops.
Interesting that they are upset about "continuous transmission" since downloading say an Ubuntu iso from an FTP site would also be a continuous transmission.
I would think that AT&T gripe has more to do with upload capacity vs. download capacity. I don't think streaming is a good comparison to P2P in this instance.
It's simple--ISPs just need to offer a whole new tier for the people that want to have unbridled connections to dozens of simultanous clients (P2P, game hosting, webhosting, ect).
If they don't come up with a solution soon, we'll be back to paying for internet by the minute. Remember AOL's launch? I do.
If I have to pay for webhosting just to get torrents, you can bet your butt I'm going to buy a domain and put up my own server.
I use torrents for absolutely everything. Distro releases, 1080p orange and peach, my entire music library is from jamendo...
So the second a service blocks torrents, they're simply out of the picture. Not under consideration.
AT+T added to blacklist.
As disgruntled Comcast customer and a 15 year AT&T wireless customer I was looking forward to transferring my Cable, Home Phone, and internet service to your U-verse service. Now my plans have changed due to your new stance laid out by Robert Quinn ‘s memo to the FCC on P2P usage as “breach of contract”. I am very concerned about the state of the internet in the United States as it seems that there are less and less ISP’s willing to do the right thing and encourage innovation instead bowing to the will and the myopic vision of automaton lawyers due to preceded nefarious activities. If in fact we are living in a free society why is it that corporations feel the need to censor the networks and service that have been bought and paid for by their users. Without Law or mandate of the government, in fact precisely the opposite, your company is banning the freedom of communication and innovation that built your company from the telegraph in your name sake to the fiber networks that you now feel are yours and yours alone. I have never considered myself the socialistic type in fact quite the opposite but your company being nationalized may be the best thing to protect the network we built from bunch of lawyers skimming the life blood of the back of the people. If you truly wanted to grow your business and move your company in to the “light” you should be increasing bandwidth and access where you are already falling far behind compared to the rest of the civilized world and some of the not so civil (AT&T 2 Mbps, Canada 7 Mbps, France 18 Mbps, Sweden 20 Mbps, Finland 24 Mbps, South Korea 45 Mbps, Japan 60 Mbps). It is sad that the company that bears the name of the company that started it all wants to revisit the time of stifling innovation and had grandmothers leasing black Bakelite telephones instead of being a front runner in network connectivity.
Uh bud, this is talking about the wireless division of ATT... p2p shouldn't be blocked on Uverse.
Uh...
Anyway, I get 25 MBps now on Comcast. If you're so worried about speed, you have options. They may not include Uverse, but who cares.
Ok...ok..what concerns me is that the term P2P is growing vague.
are they only talking about Kazaa, Limewire types?
Just about every new web app lets you "share" your content with anyone.
Will they call this P2P too??
i think ISP's should just do what their title says...service providers...not Internet police.
Ok guys don't flame me to much for this following comment, I come from a decent sized Wireless ISP in Michigan & can see where AT&T is coming from.
Wireless gear including gear that handles cell phones can not handle the same number of concurrent connections that wired network gear can handle. Sadly the concurrent connections it can handle are finite compared to a good Cisco router which is most likely the reason they put that clause in the contract.
Take for example they put up a tower that can handle 20,000 connections at once, yea relatively small but it's just an example :P
of those 20,000 you put have say 1000 normal users taking up say between 5 and 20 connections at any one time, then you take peer to peer users who when running torrents/p2p aps take up between 50 and 300 concurrent connections or more, your connection limit will get reached mighty quick as you get more & more P2P users on the wireless network.
AT&T is doing it wrong, instead of disconnecting the users they should just drop the max concurrent connection limit down to a reasonable amount where it won't kill usage of normal applications but will highly restrict P2P software on the wireless network after x number of minutes.
The filings state:
1) "Today’s P2P file sharing applications are inappropriate for AT&T’s mobile wireless broadband network, which is optimized to efficiently support high data rates for multiple users that send and receive intermittent or “bursty” traffic generated by activities such as
browsing the Internet and sending email. Because P2P file sharing applications typically engage in continuous (rather than bursty) transmissions at high data rates, a small number of users of P2P
file sharing applications served by a particular cell site could severely degrade the service quality enjoyed by all customers served by that site."
and
2) "AT&T’s terms of service for mobile wireless broadband customers prohibit all uses that may cause extreme network capacity issues, and explicitly identify P2P file sharing applications as such a use."
HERE is the problem... under terms of (2) if any activity doesn't fit the use profile for the optimizations described in (1) then it MAY be interpreted as being in breach of contract.
That means at&t optimized a certain way and if my use profile doesn't fall in line with their optimized network (for example by holding 4-6 TCP sockets open for several hours and continuously feeding data across 2-3 of those connections) then my contract could be terminated because I'm doing more than reading email and watching youtubes.
Since apparently people aren't aware of how "connections" work on a cellular network, FYI that opening a new socket to a new host on the Internet doesn't require doing anything new over the air interface. TCP/IP is encapsulated within many other layers on the wireless interface. In other words, the first socket causes an uplink (and/or downlink) connection to be made on the air interface, and the TCP/IP frames can start flowing over that connection just like any other interface. A second socket's data just gets multiplexed over that same connection, and a third, and so on. It's equivalent to only needing a single ethernet cable to get all the sockets you need.
So the issue has nothing to do with some limit on connections - it's all about bandwidth. I think they have a hard time defending that one tethered PC user should be able to download all the data they want, but as soon as they're using a P2P service, it's suddenly a violation. Carriers have options to limit bandwidth per subscriber at any given time, so that is the best option for resolving these issues, and making their decisions about how best to optimize the network for many users. The P2P users would get throttled down, just like any other user, to whatever max throughput they feel any generic user (who is subscribed to the tethered PC package) should get. It's that simple.
So if I buy an iphone 3g, install a p2p app on it and then use it to up/download "too much", my account will be termed? yay, no ETF fee. AT&T here I come....
/sarcasm
I'm guessing they haven't thought about people that play PS3, it uses P2P technology in alot of its games, Warhawk uses it to host servers. Metal Gear Solid 4 online uses p2p for it's online interactions, GTA IV uses it also( the Number One online game atm). Cut me off from using P2P, how and where does it say in My contract that I'm not allowed to? IT DOESN'T and it doesn't in any Comcast contract. I should know, I used to be one of their top Net Tech Support agents. Mr 98% first call resolution with no call backs guy. That's me!
Bloody buggers!
AT&T should spend more time worrying about patching their DNS servers.
They should be spending more time worrying about patching their unpatched DNS servers http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/07/30/1242229.shtml
Well I just called AT&T wireless and asked for a copy of my full legal / unabridged contract.
The article and the filing say "AT&T Services Inc." but I can't piece together exactly which company that is.
Given they are talking explicitly about wireless broadband applications I'm not taking any chances.