AT&T's new chief technical officer, John Donovan, wants you to know that his company does not, under any circumstances, slow down BitTorrent users or throw other monkey wrenches in the operation of specific applications.

"No. Never have. No interest in it. It's never been our policy," Donovan told Wired.com when asked if AT&T engaged in packet shaping (the process of slowing down or blocking certain applications' data packets to render them less efficient).

The statement stands in contrast to other ISPs, such as Comcast, which has, a lawsuit alleges, blocked BitTorrent traffic. Comcast has stated that it does not block any websites, applications or peer-to-peer services. Other ISPs, such as Canada-based Rogers, have been observed injecting their own content into internet data, in order to modify the appearance of Google's homepage, for instance.

Donovan did, however, indicate that AT&T will begin testing usage-based pricing starting this Fall. That's driven by the economics of building network capacity, he says, not by an attempt to make more money. According to Donovan, one percent of the company's customers account for 20 percent of the network usage; the top five percent account for 40 percent of the usage. Because the network must be able to accommodate peak traffic loads, AT&T – like other network providers – finds itself building far more capacity than most users need, just support the most prolific users.

"It's almost a taxation issue," Donovan said, comparing the overhead required to support the top 1 percent with the annual taxes the corporation must pay. "Traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year, but our revenue is not," he said.

Usage-based pricing trials will be, he says, an attempt to encourage greater efficiency in the way customers use capacity.

"I don't view any of our customers, under any circumstances, as pirates – I view them as users," Donovan said. "A heavy user is not a bad customer." What he wants to do is gently encourage more efficient usage of his network, and usage-based pricing may be one of the ways that happens.

Such measures may not even be necessary, as Donovan admits that users self-adjust their habits to take advantage of off-peak times. For instance, he said, BitTorrent on the company's network peaks around 4 a.m., when other traffic is at an ebb. Overall P2P traffic accounts for about 20 percent of the network's usage, Donovan said.

But really, he'd rather talk about the massive increase in bandwidth that the company is planning.

On the wireless front, AT&T is currently in the midst of a 3-G upgrade, based on HSPA technology, that will take over-the-air download speeds from 1.7 Mbps now to 7 Mbps in the next phase and, finally, to 11 Mbps. (The company did not provide specifics on when these speeds would be in effect.) Starting in 2012 or 2013, the company will begin its deployment of fourth-generation "Long-Term Evolution" (LTE) technology, which promises speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

For wired internet access, Donovan boasted of a recently-upgrade backbone that's now capable of 40 Mbps, and stated that the company is in the process of deploying fiber optic networks to people's homes, starting with all new housing developments.

It's not just about fat pipes, either: AT&T also wants to bring you content and applications. Top of the list is internet video, with new interfaces that will let you watch any video content online – not just cable TV channels – on your television.

"We should be able to radically reshape the interface for TV," Donovan said. "The remote will be dead. The channels will be dead. If all the historical video is available online there's no reason we can't organize that for you."

Even though it aspires to become a content provider, the company is also open to allowing other companies to offer competitive content and applications over AT&T's data lines, Donovan said.

Donovan did not address questions relating to the company's alleged data connections with the National Security Administration. Wired.com reported in 2006 that the company provided NSA officials with full access to customers' phone calls and internet traffic via a secret monitoring closet, a claim that the company has not confirmed nor denied.

AT&T officials insisted that anything related to the company's involvement with the NSA was off the table, as a precondition of the meeting with Wired.com.

Also, Donovan did not offer any specifics on the company's possible plans to monitor network traffic for copyright violations, as public policy chief James Cicconi suggested it might. Donovan said such monitoring was technically possible, and could be targeted either at specific applications or at specific copyrighted content, via deep packet inspection. However, he said the company was not currently monitoring such usage on an individual customer level.

Photo: John Donovan, by James Merithew/Wired.com