AT&T Tries Charging Users $7 Extra For ‘Turbo’ 5G
For years, big ISPs have made it abundantly clear that they dream of being able to abuse their gatekeeper power over telecom markets to tilt the playing field in their favor. Whether it was Verizon’s early attempts to force you to buy their GPS apps and mapping services, to AT&T’s later-year efforts with “sponsored data” (letting certain big companies buy a network advantage), their goals have never been subtle.
Unfortunately for them, consumer groups, activists, and regulators keep screwing up their plans with that whole “net neutrality” thing.
Last month, the FCC finally got around to restoring net neutrality rules, which prohibit ISPs from being too obviously obnoxious when it comes to anti-competitive behavior. The rules ban ISPs from blocking or throttling competitors, or from striking deals that could distort the competitive landscape (like say by giving Disney faster network performance and exemption from data caps, but not a nonprofit).
Since AT&T can’t engage in the kind of fully anti-competitive efforts they were hoping for, they’ve been relegated to trying to nickel-and-dime consumers in less spectacular ways. For example, last week the company announced they’d be offering the company’s 5G users “Turbo” speeds for an extra $7 a month.
The $7 surcharge, for each line on your account, “boosts all the high-speed and hotspot data on a user’s connection.” It does this by assigning “Quality of Service Class Identifiers,” which effectively gives some users network priority. The “boost” is only available on unlimited data plans, and even then AT&T will still throttle your connection down if you consume more than 75 GB of data.
Some business users who videoconference on the go might find some benefit from the guaranteed performance, but it’s unlikely many users (who already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for wireless data) will be all that interested. Verizon tried charging users $10 extra a month just to connect at 5G speeds, but had to back off once it was clear that most users care more about affordability.
While AT&T’s initial offering doesn’t violate net neutrality, some consumer advocates say that the act of speeding up some customers could slow down others. And the pricing mostly just makes for a confusing user experience:
“Unlike speed tiers, or different data allowances, if a bunch of users effectively buy their way to the front of the line, that could end up degrading the experience for other users. Apart from that, it could just lead to a confusing billing experience, and users being upsold on a service they don’t need, and that may not end up being that useful.”
But generally there’s nothing wrong with giving people with extra disposable income an opportunity to set it on fire. We’ll have to see if AT&T, known for always pushing its luck when it comes to nickel-and-diming consumers in creative and obnoxious ways, expands or tweaks the offering in ways that could be viewed as anti-competitive.