AT&T to Vuze: your TCP reset test proves nothing

AT&T has sent a cool response to the Vuze Corporation's "Plug-In" survey of ISPs, ranked by their median rate of TCP reset activity: "Given that Vuze itself has recognized these problems with the measurements generated by its Plug-In, we believe that Vuze should not have published these misleading measurements, nor filed them with the [Federal Communications Commission]." So AT&T Vice President Charles Kalmanek Jr. wrote to Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa, following the P2P content provider's FCC filing last week. And AT&T insists that it does not insert false reset signals into P2P packets. AT&T's April 24th response categorically denies that any negative significance can be traced from Vuze's experiment. "AT&T does not use 'false reset messages' to manage its network," the telco giant says. "We agree with Vuze that the use of the Vuze Plug-In to measure network traffic has numerous limitations and deficiencies, and does not demonstrate whether any particular network providers or their customers are using TCP Reset messages for network management purposes." And in its response, AT&T forwarded Vuze and the FCC an academic paper from Canada's University of Calgary, which argues that resets often occur due to "network outages, attacks, or reconfigurations." The authors based their conclusions, published in 2004, on a one year study of the Calgary campus network, which found that 15 to 25 percent of TCP connections had at least one reset.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080428-att-to-vuze-your-tcp-reset...