Either AT&T knows something we don’t or they’ve been awarded one of the most pointless – yet useful – patents so far. The new patent granted to AT&T is for a ‘fast lane’ designed to speed up BitTorrent and P2P file transfers while decreasing the impact they have on the infrastructure.
Peer to peer traffic accounts for a lot of petabytes of data, so it seems a logical choice for an ISP to optimize it. However, with the net-neutrality debate which has been going on, it’s unlikely to ever be introduced. Neutrality goes both ways, no traffic is to be treated differently.
The new patent is titled System and Method to Guide Active Participation in Peer-to-Peer Systems with Passive Monitoring Environment and involves both local caching by the ISP and interpretation of the data to server the packets as fast as possible without bottlenecking the own system.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing us with this information
