AT&T’s new chief technical officer John Donovan has stated that AT&T will not be interfering with BitTorrent users.

Donovan told Wired.com that AT&T is not interested in slowing down, stopping, or interfering with BitTorrent traffic.

It’s a bit of a twist in the ISP holy war against piracy and bandwidth hogs. Comcast is infamous for throttling P2P users and denying service to customers that slow down their network by downloading big files.

However, Donovan did indicate that AT&T was interested in testing a usage-based pricing business model in the fall. What model the company will use is still unclear. 

“One percent of the company’s customers account for 20 percent of the network usage,” said Donovan. 

“Traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year, but our revenue is not.”

Now that sounds more like what Comcast has been complaining about.

Donovan thinks that usage-based pricing models may be the answer to a more efficient network that can support growing demand. At least this model lets customers pay for their traffic without having them worry about getting cut off.

Still, don’t think for a second that AT&T has gone soft and will let anyone do anything over their network. During his interview with Wired.com, Donovan refused to discuss the subject of deep packet inspection, based on a 2006 release of customer phone calls and internet traffic given to the National Security Administration.

Not surprisingly, Donovan was more interested in talking about the company’s new 3-G network upgrade. It’s going to give AT&T customers a 5+ Mbps upgrade. Now that’s something that should get the iPhone fan boys talking.

T.J. Kirchner

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Entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 8:47 pm under Internet.

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