AT&T officials provide details about carrier’s prioritization offering for enterprises, first responders

Although many intriguing solutions have been developed that could leverage broadband connectivity to serve the needs of enterprise, public-safety and critical-infrastructure customers, many of them are utilized to their fullest extent—if at all—because there has been no guarantee that the application will work properly, according to Danessa Lambdin, AT&T’s vice president of mobility product management.

“This is one space where we will work really closely with our customers, because the innovation that we’re going to see in the next 12, 18 and 24 months in this space is going to be really, really important,” Lambdin said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

“A lot of the applications that are in use today haven’t really considered QoS, because it’s not available. There’s going to be a lot of work on our part and our customers’ part as we look to develop solutions with them and for them that will be able to leverage this capability and are designed to use this capability.”

Potential customers that have expressed interest in AT&T’s new offering include entities in the utility, public-safety, transportation, hospitality and logistics sectors, according to Myers.

Lambdin said AT&T worked “very closely” with the carrier’s FirstNet team to develop the Dynamic Traffic Management offering, which potentially could be leveraged as part of a roaming agreement with FirstNet.

AT&T believe the new priority-service solution meets the FCC’s rules calling for neutral treatment of traffic on commercial networks, Lambdin said.

“This falls within the guidelines of the FCC net-neutrality rules,” Lambdin said. “As you can imagine, we have a lot of policy experts running around AT&T, and we leave that to them. But rest assured that they’ve been involved with us the whole way, and … they’ve assured us that that this falls within the guidelines.”