AT&T announces $7 monthly add-on fee for "Turbo" 5G speeds
Quality of service
An article by The Mobile Report said that AT&T will differentiate between users who pay for Turbo and those who don't with Quality of Service Class Identifiers, or QCIs. "We're told that, basically, all eligible plans are now moved to QCI 8, and get the privilege of buying their way back into QCI 7," the article said. QCI 6 is reportedly reserved for public safety professionals on the FirstNet service built by AT&T under a government contract.
AT&T confirmed to Ars today that Turbo "is assigned to a QCI to which some of our consumer traffic was previously assigned." But AT&T said it has "materially modified it and increased network resources and relative weighting for AT&T Turbo traffic, thereby creating a higher level of performance than we've ever before offered to consumers."
AT&T also said that QCIs "are simply a number assigned to a class of service," and that the "treatment and performance of traffic in a particular class is affected by a range of variables that can be tuned to provide different experiences." AT&T said that last summer, it "rationalized and streamlined how our plans are mapped to QCI levels" and that "these changes helped optimize network performance for our overall customer base."
The current version of Turbo may be followed by other paid extras that enhance performance, as AT&T called it the "first step in modernizing and preparing our mobile network for future innovative use cases... Latency-sensitive applications will continue to need more enhanced network technologies to perform their best, so we plan to continue to advance and evolve AT&T Turbo."
Net neutrality implications
AT&T introduced the $7 add-on one week after the Federal Communications Commission voted to restore net neutrality rules. AT&T argues that Turbo is consistent with open Internet principles because "once turned on the boost applies to a customer's data regardless of the Internet content, applications, and services being used."
The net neutrality rules prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization that favors some traffic over other traffic. There is also a general conduct standard "that prohibits unreasonable interference or unreasonable disadvantage to consumers or edge providers," in which the FCC would evaluate possible violations on a case-by-case basis.
If the FCC evaluates AT&T Turbo, the agency could decide that it is similar to how home Internet service providers charge higher prices for faster speed tiers, a longtime practice that is allowed. But the FCC might also examine whether the different tiers of service significantly harm broadband quality for users who don't pay extra.