AT&T co-sponsors study to determine Net Neutrality is bad

Troy (NY) - A new study from AT&T Labs, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Nevada, Reno says that setting up the Internet on a tiered level would offer "significantly more" capacity than the system that’s being used now.

Principal investigator in the study and engineering professor at Rensselaer Shivkumar Kalyanaraman said the study shows conclusively "there are substantial additional costs for the extra capacity required to operate networks in which all traffic is treated alike, and carrying traffic that needs to still be assured performance as specified in service level agreements."

A few years ago, AT&T suggested a tiered Internet service and was taken less than seriously. Now it’s one of three institutions in the study that says it has scientific evidence supporting such a move would be a good thing.

The goal is to get Congress to pass a law that would implement a tiered Internet service, wherein high bandwidth websites like Google and Amazon would need to pay higher rates to ISPs like AT&T.

It’s a motion that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has previously decided against, but in light of the new report the government body now doesn’t feel so strongly about it and says implementing Net Neutrality would be "no big deal".

The study says that if networks remain undifferentiated, total capacity needed would be nearly twice as much as if it were differentiated, during peak hours of usage.