Well after comcast and the other cable providers got hit by the FCC you might think ATT would have taken a moment to review their new TOS policy before implementing it.

It seems that they have been shaping traffic across their network for users that access files through P2P networks.

Many Network Systems make use of huge caching systems to lower the cost of network traffic.

Depending on how a ISP sets up their Cache Server they can reduce huge amounts of duplicate traffic throughout the day. The Cache services are transparent to the customer through Squid and other daemonst that store files This means if you download a anti-virus ap monday at 9am you may actually be getting the file that someone downloaded 20 minutes or and hour or a day before.

Unfortunately P2P doesn’t play the same. Traffic on P2P networks is always different however P2P itself can reduce traffic across the internet by allowing computers that are close together to transfer parts of files within the same network.

Anyway it seems that ATT ended up having to retract their shaping or (slowing down) of P2P traffic but there is no word of any fines that might be placed on the company as of yet.