• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 29, 2008

AT&T said it doesn't throttle Web traffic, contrary to a report filed with the Federal Communications Commission last week by online video company Vuze.

"AT&T does not use 'false reset messages' to manage its network," the company wrote to Vuze CEO BianRosa Gilles, in a letter it also forwarded to the FCC. "We believe that Vuze should not have published these misleading measurements, nor filed them with the FCC," stated the letter by AT&T's Charles Kalmanek, vice president, Internet and network systems research.

Vuze's Gilles sounded an apologetic note Monday. "Our data suggests that the reset rates for Bell South, which is owned by AT&T, were higher than for many other ISPs. Our data collection was credible and transparent, but not conclusive," he said. Gilles added that the company "decided that it was best to simply ask AT&T and others if they use reset messages as a network management technique."

"AT&T has now answered that they do not. We appreciate their response and hope all network operators will be as forthcoming," he said.

After it was revealed that Comcast was systematically interfering with traffic to peer-to-peer sites, online video company Vuze conducted a test of other networks to determine which other companies might be impeding visits.

The company, which last year filed an FCC complaint against Comcast for slowing traffic to peer-to-peer sites, recently published the results of its test and sent them to the FCC. Vuze specifically looked at TCP resets, which is one technique that Internet service providers sometimes use to interfere with traffic.

Comcast recently said it would stop interfering with visits to bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer sites and will instead develop a "protocol agnostic" system for handling Web traffic by the end of the year.