As far as I could tell it was by identifying the type of traffic.
I was primarily torrenting various linux distros, and I tried a wide variety of them on various clients and systems. It was fairly consistent behavior, even if I torrented a 'buntu distro on my phone and throttled it to a few KBps my TV's Netflix would stutter, degrade, and ultimately drop out entirely within a few minutes. If I stopped the torrent the connection would resume normally a few minutes later.
One thing that really bothered me, though, was that every time I experienced this problem I could go to speedtest.net and run their tool and get consistently good results every time. Even when the rest of the internet was bollocks. It makes me wonder if they intentionally toss speed test traffic into one of their "fast lanes" to trick people into thinking they're getting faster speeds than what they're actually getting.
Apparently, nothing. After I had narrowed the issue down to torrents, I called AT&T and confronted them with the evidence. On the phone with me they directly said "we do that to prevent illegal activity over our service lines."
No amount of "torrenting is not illegal" worked, and I didn't really expect it to. They don't care about the legality, they only use it as an excuse to keep customers from getting the full usage of the service they pay for.
Comments
As far as I could tell it was by identifying the type of traffic.
I was primarily torrenting various linux distros, and I tried a wide variety of them on various clients and systems. It was fairly consistent behavior, even if I torrented a 'buntu distro on my phone and throttled it to a few KBps my TV's Netflix would stutter, degrade, and ultimately drop out entirely within a few minutes. If I stopped the torrent the connection would resume normally a few minutes later.
One thing that really bothered me, though, was that every time I experienced this problem I could go to speedtest.net and run their tool and get consistently good results every time. Even when the rest of the internet was bollocks. It makes me wonder if they intentionally toss speed test traffic into one of their "fast lanes" to trick people into thinking they're getting faster speeds than what they're actually getting.
I've always thought this myself, what prevents them from doing so?
Apparently, nothing. After I had narrowed the issue down to torrents, I called AT&T and confronted them with the evidence. On the phone with me they directly said "we do that to prevent illegal activity over our service lines."
No amount of "torrenting is not illegal" worked, and I didn't really expect it to. They don't care about the legality, they only use it as an excuse to keep customers from getting the full usage of the service they pay for.
Isn't that what net neutrality is for?