US Mobile has added priority data to its Warp 5G plans. The founder and CEO of US Mobile, Ahmed Khattak, has been busy on Reddit over the last 12 hours letting people know of the launch.
What Is The Significance Of This Announcement?
This announcement mainly has meaning for tech enthusiasts and people living in some highly populated areas, and even then, the relevance is becoming more questionable by the day. Basically, carriers have quality of service policies in place to help keep their networks running smoothly so that a majority of consumers can have a good user experience while on the network. In the most technical of terms, the quality of service policies are denoted by class identifiers such as QCI-8 and QCI-9 which Ahmed makes a reference to in his Reddit post. In the case of Verizon, a plan with a QCI-8 policy will have higher network priority access than one with a QCI-9 value.
In general, but not always, subscribers on a postpaid major carrier plan typically have a higher level of priority on a network compared to subscribers on a prepaid or MVNO plan. So what this means is that during times that there's a lot of traffic on the network, premium paying customers will have a more premium experience, they will have faster data speeds compared to their prepaid and MVNO counterparts. Another way of saying this is that premium paying customers have priority data access on the network.
However, with the continued rollout of 5G c-band/mid-band coverage from the major carriers, the relevance or at least impact of priority data and data prioritization policies should become less important and meaningful if they will even be at all. But right now, these data prioritization policies can still cause a headache for a small number of users in certain locations making the use of an MVNO almost impossible. In heavily network congested areas, data speeds can become virtually unusable with some MVNOs. Verizon is notorious for having what many Reddit and other forum users describe as the most aggressive data prioritization policy. In heavily congested areas, Verizon may more aggressively slow their MVNO partners' data speeds compared to what T-Mobile and AT&T do with their MVNO partners. But even with priority data access, data speeds aren't guaranteed to be blazingly fast. As US Mobile's CEO Ahmed Khattak recently pointed out on Reddit:
US Mobile's announcement will be beneficial to some consumers and it will allow US Mobile to pick up incrementally more customers. Potential customers that couldn't use an MVNO before due to living in congested areas with these data prioritization policies will now have more options available to them for their wireless service. Of course, US Mobile isn't the only known MVNO provider to offer priority data on Verizon. Spectrum Mobile for instance also has it. And I think we can expect more providers to offer it, or at least render its impact to be much less impactful, as major networks continue to roll out and improve their 5G networks.
All plans get priority data until stated premium data thresholds get reached at which point data speeds both slow and are also subjected to deprioritization. For more, see their network terms and disclosureshttps://t.co/hOUlWFvebT
— BestMVNO (@bestmvno) March 22, 2022
US Mobile uses both the Verizon and T-Mobile networks for coverage. US Mobile refers to its Super LTE network to denote plans that use Verizon, and GSM to denote plans that use T-Mobile. The priority data announcement seems to be aimed at its Verizon-based plans. BestMVNO is awaiting clarification on this.
US Mobile received $11.5 million in funding from Volition Capital in July of 2021 which it is using to help improve its services and grow its subscriber base.