AT&T has introduced quality of service features for its 5G service, intended to offer a more-consistent access experience for gaming, social video broadcasting and live video conferencing, known as "AT&T Turbo."
But AT&T has not really said “how” it is providing what appears to be data prioritization, nor been specific about the degree of performance improvement. One would think the technique involves giving AT&T Turbo users a different “class of service” tags.
Even before the advent of 5G network slicing, which enables the creation of virtual private networks, mobile and fixed network operators had a few techniques to create different classes of service.
DiffServ (Differentiated Services) is a widely-used standard that classifies traffic into different categories based on a DSCP (Differentiated Services Code Point) value. The DSCP value is a code embedded in the IP packet header that identifies the traffic type (such as high-priority voice call, video streaming, web browsing). Routers within the network use this DSCP code to prioritize packets and allocate resources accordingly.
Operators also cna use QoS queuing to create separate queues for different traffic classes within routers. High-priority traffic gets placed in a higher priority queue, ensuring it gets processed first. This helps minimize latency for critical applications like online gaming or video conferencing.
ISPs also can set bandwidth limits for specific types of traffic or entire user accounts. This helps prevent network congestion and ensures fair allocation of bandwidth among users. For example, an ISP might throttle video streaming after a certain data usage threshold to avoid impacting other users' internet experience.
Traffic shaping can be used to define the rate and burstiness (peak data transfer) for different traffic types, which can help smooth out traffic flow and prevent congestion.
It is unclear which techniques AT&T might be using.
Service providers have tended to provide such services for business customers, as network neutrality principles generally apply only to consumer services, whether fixed or mobile. Called “AT&T Turbo”
But that is changing, as mobile service providers start to offer quality-of-service features for consumer mobile services, and as 5G network slicing becomes available .
In part, these are moves that begin to extend fixed network differentiated service tiers to mobile service. Though mobile data plans long have included variable data consumption plans that also offer product differentiation, the newer QoS plans increase ability to differentiate by quality of service, not simply speed or data usage.
Even if there are other differentiation mechanisms (content bundling; prepaid; network coverage), mobile operators still have significant room to create distinctiveness using speed, data plans and latency-related features of their networks.
Tiered data plans based on usage create distinct tiers of service for users who use differing amounts of mobile data.
Still, up to this point, mobile operators have tended not to differentiate on access speed, offering one “best effort” speed for all users. Only business users have had access to service plans that guarantee minimum abscess speeds.
Likewise, only business service plans have offered prioritized data access during times of network congestion.
The new shift to QoS features for consumers seems largely a result of network slicing features of 5G networks, which will enable minimum guaranteed latency performance.
But network slicing can, in principle, also support guaranteed minimum speeds as well, allowing the creation of consumer service plans that provide QoS features.
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