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

AT&T recently announced the launch of Dynamic Traffic Management, an offering that uses quality-of-service (QoS) technology in its LTE network to prioritize network traffic from enterprise, public-safety and critical-infrastructure customers during times of network congestion.

By subscribing to the Dynamic Traffic Management solution for an extra $10 per month per device, an enterprise can have its traffic prioritized on AT&T’s existing LTE networks—the service is not available in areas where only 2G and 3G networks have been deployed—when normal best-effort service may be degraded by network contention, according to Gerry Myers, director of product marketing management for AT&T business services.

“The solution basically is designed to enable the enterprise and government customers to manage which of their business applications or application data traffic receives enhanced QoS treatment on the 4G LTE network, enabling them to better manage their application data traffic during times of network congestion,” Myers said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

“We see this providing customers with a more predictable, quality network experience during times when congestion may be high, such as during a special event, traffic jams, weather events, emergency situations—things that are predictable in that they happen, but they are unpredictable in the sense of when they happen.”

For an additional $15 per month, public-safety entities can have prioritized traffic privileges and priority access, which automatically puts the user at the top of the access queue, Myers said.

“Based on the offering that we’ve introduced now, we’re not preempting traffic,” he said. “We’re providing priority queuing and then priority retention as you move about … when you move from one cell sector to another cell sector, you maintain that priority standing.”