Commercial priority-service offerings promise to be eye-opening to carriers, public safety, critical infrastructure

During the past few months, the two largest U.S. wireless carriers—Verizon and AT&T—each have announced offerings that would enable enterprise, public-safety and critical-infrastructure customers to have their packets prioritized over normal consumer traffic, even during times of severe network congestion. Such offerings have raised eyebrows throughout the wireless community and could have significant implications in the near future.

There is little question that there is a market demand for such services. Many enterprises have business-critical applications that must run smoothly and efficiently—time is money, and any delay in operations can have a negative impact on the bottom line. For public-safety and critical-infrastructure entities, the stakes are even higher, as their successful operations can mean the difference between life and death for many.

Despite this market demand for such priority-service offerings, their announcement caught many off guard. After all, the carriers had long said that would not prioritize public-safety traffic, because doing so could result in regular consumer customers not receiving the kind of network performance they expect. It was a major talking point that public-safety representatives repeated on Capitol Hill as they spent years lobbying for legislation that resulted in the establishment of FirstNet.

In addition, the FCC early this year approved rules regarding net neutrality that basically said that carriers should treat all traffic on their networks equally, with concepts like “pay for play” supposedly being banned specifically. Given this, it appeared that carriers would not be allowed to charge enterprises and public safety more to get priority access, even if a carrier wanted to do it.

But the AT&T offering—known as Dynamic Traffic Management—is designed to comply with net-neutrality rules, according to Danessa Lambdin, AT&T’s vice president of mobility product management.

“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.”

If the prioritization service does not fall victim to a legal challenge, what does the AT&T offering—as well as the “mission-critical” package unveiled by Verizon this fall—mean to enterprises, public-safety and critical-infrastructure entities?