AT&T announces $7 monthly surcharge for 'Turbo' 5G speeds.

AT&T is now charging mobile customers an additional $7 per month for faster wireless data speeds. AT&T says the Turbo add-on, Available starting today“It is designed to support high-performance mobile applications, such as gaming, social video streaming and live video conferencing, with optimized data while customers are on the go.”

While Turbo “boosts all high-speed data and hotspots on a user's connection,” AT&T said the difference will be more pronounced for certain types of applications. For example, gaming apps that use Turbo will see “less freezing or stuttering and lower latency,” AT&T said.

Charges $7 per line. Adding Turbo to multiple lines on the same account requires paying the additional fee for each line. AT&T said Turbo allows users to “optimize their plan's high-speed (premium) data allocations and hotspots” and provides better data performance “even during busy times on the network.”

Turbo is only available for 5G phones on certain “unlimited” plans. AT&T notes that “Turbo does not provide additional data” and that “if you exceed current allotments, normal network management will apply.”

“On AT&T Unlimited Extra EL after 75GB, AT&T may temporarily slow data speeds if the network is busy,” the company says. “On each eligible plan, after you exceed your hotspot allotment, your hotspot speeds are slowed to a maximum of 128 Kbps.”

People who pay extra for Turbo may want to look at their video settings. By default, AT&T limits video streaming to DVD quality, but customers can Play high definition video At the expense of using more data.

Quality of service

that Article by Mobile Report He said AT&T will differentiate between users who pay for Turbo and those who don't Quality of service class identifiersor QCIs. “We've been told that, essentially, all eligible plans have now been moved to QCI 8, and have the purchase privilege back to QCI 7,” the article said. QCI 6 is said to be intended 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 QCI for which some consumer traffic was previously assigned.” But AT&T said it has “substantially modified it and increased the network resources and relative weight of AT&T Turbo traffic, thereby creating a higher level of performance than we have offered consumers before.”

AT&T also said that QCIs “are merely a number assigned to a class of service,” and that “the treatment and performance of traffic in a given class is affected by a set of variables that can be adjusted to provide different experiences.” AT&T said that last summer it “streamlined and simplified how our plans are assigned to QCI tiers” and that “these changes helped improve network performance for our overall customer base.”

The current version of Turbo may be followed by other paid add-ons that improve performance, with AT&T describing it as “the first step in modernizing and preparing our mobile network for future innovative use cases… Latency-sensitive applications will continue to need more optimized network technologies to deliver.” Its best, so we plan to continue to develop and develop AT&T Turbo.”