This story has been updated to include a statement from AT&T confirming the peering deal.

Netflix has reached an agreement with AT&T to give its streaming service direct access to AT&T's network, with the goal of reducing buffering when subscribers watch shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.

The so-called peering arrangement went into effect on Tuesday, said two people with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be named because an announcement isn't planed. The sources declined to provide financial terms of the deal. AT&T confirmed the deal in an e-mailed statement.

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

Netflix has said it's paying some of the biggest Internet service providers in the U.S. for direct access to their networks in order to sidestep congestion that has caused frustrations for subscribers streaming high-definition videos. The company already signed similar "peering" or "interconnect" agreements with Comcast and Verizon this year.

Netflix, as well as Google's YouTube, provides a regularly updated video quality report that ranks the speed of ISPs. AT&T's services have typically ranked low on Netflix's list, although Verizon's services haven't fared much better since it signed a peering agreement with Netflix.

Earlier this year, Netflix made clear it wasn't happy about having to pay Comcast to deliver its content faster to consumers. It has waged a public campaign about the danger such deals pose to net neutrality, even as it has signed agreements with more providers.

In June, the Federal Communications Commission said it would try to obtain details of deals between Internet providers and content companies, including Netflix and YouTube.

But the agreements wouldn't be covered by the FCC's newly proposed rules for regulating how companies control the flow of data on the Internet. Net neutrality advocates are calling for the agency to take aggressive steps to ensure that ISPs are not able to play favorites among content providers.

Historically, peering agreements have been a common part of how the Internet operates — and haven't required payments between companies — by allowing users and content providers to send data across numerous networks. The goal was to balance traffic from one provider's network to another's.

More recently, Internet providers have begun to seek compensation for the traffic that some companies, such as Netflix, create on their networks. These deals create direct physical connections between networks.

Despite consumer frustrations over buffering speeds, Netflix's popularity continues to grow. The company said this month it had surpassed 50 million streaming subscribers, with 36.2 million in the U.S. and 13.8 million internationally. House of Cards, Netflix's first exclusive series, earned 13 Emmy nominations for its second season, while Netflix's prison drama Orange Is the New Black received 12 nominations.

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