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AT&T: Just like Comcast only worse

Posted on November 9th, 2007 | by Billifer | AT&T, bandwidth, bandwidth shaping, BitTorrent, Fedora Linux, net neutrality, SBC, SBC Yahoo! DSL, throughput, Yahoo

It came out last month that Internet service provider Comcast was rate-limiting the bandwidth availability of its customers who were using BitTorrent. Now, it appears, AT&T’s SBC Yahoo! DSL is doing the same.

I am a AT&T customer (more by necessity than by choice), and after attempts to get the newest Fedora Linux ISO image via BitTorrent—completely legal and within the scope of that permitted by Fedora—were painful at best, I decided to download it directly from Fedora Project: placing the entire burden of the upload on one non-profit entity (Fedora) as opposed to a distributed system which would actually help bandwidth utilization for everyone.

What I noticed was that when the Torrent was open, even if it was slow, my entire connection was limited to less than half the level of service that I pay to use. Instead of the 6 Megabit service, I was getting somewhere between 2 and 3 Megabit download rates.

I tried an experiment: I capped the bandwidth on the torrent to 10 Kilobytes per second: an extremely slow speed, barely noticeable when you’re (supposedly) surfing at 6 Megabits per second. Despite that, my direct download from Fedora Project never reached more than 300 Kilobytes (2.4 Megabits) while it was running. When I paused the torrent, the direct download immediately jumped up to over 600 Kilobytes per second: nearly 5 megabits (and the practical throughput limit of the theoretical 6 megabit bandwidth).

There’s nothing neutral about this net. I do not agree with the decision to throttle any traffic, torrent or otherwise, but it would be slightly more understandable if ISPs only throttled the packets determined to contain illegal content. (How that determination would be made is unknown, but it’s slightly more agreeable in theory.)

To throttle all bandwidth, though, to less than half of what the customer has paid to use, for no reason at all—none, as I have said, because my intent was to download a torrent made available legally. Even if I had more questionable motives, however, my ISP has no way of knowing that, nor should they be scanning all the traffic flowing through their pipes.

In fact, when they do scan all the traffic they threaten their own safe harbor status provided under the Communications Decency Act—the only that says that ISPs and web hosting providers are not liable for the content placed there by their customers, which in practice keeps such ISPs and web hosting companies (and YouTube and MySpace and every other web site you know about) from losing their shirts due to copyright infringement, child pornography, hate speech, and other content that has been deemed to be unlawful.

So it’s yet one more double standard in the war of megacorporations versus the common people: SBC gets to steal my bandwidth that I’ve paid for back from me, but I don’t get to do anything about it. In fact, according to their new Terms of Service, they could even disconnect my service for criticizing them. But then, I’m observing, not criticizing.  ⌘