Netflix has agreed to pay AT&T for a direct connection to the Internet service provider's network, a move that will improve streaming video quality.

The deal is no surprise—it was widely expected after Netflix reached similar agreements with Comcast and Verizon. What is surprising is that AT&T customers might see their Netflix quality problems resolved before Verizon customers.

"We reached an interconnect agreement with AT&T in May and since then have been working together to provision additional interconnect capacity to improve the viewing experience of our mutual subscribers," a Netflix spokesperson told Ars. "We're now beginning to turn up the connections, a process that should be complete in the coming days."

Mashable broke news of the deal earlier today. AT&T also confirmed it.

If the interconnections are all turned on within "the coming days," then AT&T will have built up a peering infrastructure with Netflix that is significantly faster than Verizon's network. Verizon and Netflix struck a paid peering deal in late April, yet Verizon said it will take until the end of the year to set up the necessary connections.

Netflix performance on Verizon FiOS, already poor, dropped another 17 percent in June, while Netflix streaming speed on Verizon DSL dropped another 13 percent.

Netflix performance on AT&T was similarly bad in June. If all goes as planned, we could see improvements in AT&T's results in August.

Comcast's Netflix performance improved almost immediately after the companies announced a paid peering deal in April, largely because the Comcast and Netflix technical teams worked together for months prior to the contract being signed. More than 300 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports were set up at 10 or so interconnection points around the country to carry Netflix traffic into the Comcast network.

The paid peering deals don't give Netflix priority over other applications after video traffic enters the ISP networks and travels toward consumers, but they do ensure that Netflix bypasses congested links between the ISPs and the rest of the Internet. Netflix's connections to the big ISPs are similar to ones enjoyed by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and others.

For more on how the peering business works, see our recent feature, "How Comcast became a powerful—and controversial—part of the Internet backbone."