AT&T thinks people are willing to pay $7 extra per month for what it claims is “enhanced data connectivity for real-time responsiveness.” This new AT&T “Turbo” option is rolling out now, and the carrier says it “boosts all the high-speed and hotspot data” while active.
In a press release announcing the new option, AT&T says that AT&T Turbo will offer better reliability and stability, particularly for things that require “real-time responsiveness.” In fact, it’s only this
Built to support high-performance mobile applications, like gaming, social video broadcasting and live video conferencing, with optimized data while customers are on the go. AT&T Turbo allows users the choice to optimize their network when they want by adding additional network resources to their mobile data connection.
For example, if customers want less freezing or stuttering and lower latency when milliseconds matter in gaming, AT&T Turbo can help offer real-time responsiveness by improving the performance of customers’ data on the network.
While AT&T’s announcement is light on details, a report from The Mobile Report says that AT&T is essentially moving all plans to Quality of Service Class Identifier 8 (or QCI 8), a step backward from QCI 7. This is essentially one peg down the ladder in terms of network priority. Then, if customers pay $7 per month for AT&T Turbo, they are essentially “buying their way back into QCI 7.”
AT&T shared additional details with Ars Technica today:
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.”
AT&T Turbo doesn’t, however, give you unfettered access to AT&T’s network. First, in order to added Turbo to your plan, you’ll have to already be subscribed to one of AT&T’s “Unlimited” plans. Those plans, of course, don’t actually offer unlimited data.
For instance, the “AT&T Unlimited Extra EL” offers you 75GB of data per month. If you exceed that allotment, AT&T will throttle your data speeds “if the network is busy” – even if you pay the $7/month for Turbo. It’s also still not explicitly clear just how much better performance you can expect if you pay for AT&T, or if the speed boost applies to all traffic or just certain traffic.
If you feel so inclined, you can sign up for AT&T Turbo using the myATT app or through AT&T’s website.
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