Cellular Phones- Technical Question…
 

Can cellular companies control the phone call quality and data speed/quality over the network BASED on your identity?

Not a conspiratorial/ or privacy question…but more of a ‘does (or can) price buy quality?

ATT controls the vast majority of GSM towers in the USA. Yet they sell access to Tmoble, Mint, Consumer Cellular, etc etc. Can ATT give higher proiority to their own customers than their ‘renters’? DO THEY?

Not ‘will I get a signal’ or ‘will my phone ring’… more ‘is the bandwidth the same, is the call quality the same, for all users of a given network?’

I know ATT can give priority to first responders in an emergency situation….is a version of this how they sell capacity for cheap?

Anyone KNOW?

They definitely can. With many carriers, after a certain data usage threshold is met they can throttle down your speed. I know with tethering through my phone I can pay more for faster speeds. The basic is painfully slow but I give T-Mobile an extra $20/mo and I get nice fast browsing and up/downloads. AT&T, etc. could absolutely prioritize their customers if they chose to.

For clarity purposes, AT&T may sell tower access, but they don't host T-Mobile calls on their network per se.

Companies like Mint and Consumer Cellular do buy bandwidth from the three major carriers. Mint uses T-Mobile infrastructure exclusively, and Consumer upon signing up a client assigns a user to either AT&T or T-Mobile. Verizon also leases bandwidth on their network, with Spectrum and Straight Talk as sellers. Reselling bandwidth is big business in the US. I read that are more than 125 virtual network operators.

As an aside, Dish TV is trying to develop their own 5G infrastructure. But the capital cost needed is tremendous (estimated north of $10 billion).
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My understanding is that most cellular towers are owned by REITs like American Tower, not by the phone companies anymore

Towers host antennas from different companies. Each one pays for the space.

https://www.steelintheair.com/cell-tower-companies/

-David

Yes, the networks will favor their own customers over their indirect customers that come through 3rd party resellers like Consumer, Mint, etc... because their SLA is written to let them prioritize their own traffic.

The regulatory framework is similar to when the baby-bells like Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, SBC, etc... were RBOC and third party CLEC started offering service. They could prioritize their own traffic when there's congestion but they can't deliberately impair those 3rd parties.

T-Mobile, btw, still has its own cellular network with a stronger focus on 5G.

They can and they do. TMo will discriminate service levels based on pricing plan.

Cheap plan:
Middle tier:
So at the low end, you’re deprioritized at any time. In the middle, only if you’re over a monthly allowance.

Mint, which uses their network, gets lower than all native customers

Cell phone plans love choking the chicken on their networks.

Yes, carriers routinely deprioritize traffic of MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators - the companies like Mint that rent capacity on others’ networks) on their networks. That’s one of the gotchas with signing up with them.

This is also how FirstNet works. FirstNet is more or less a MVNO that operates mostly on AT&T’s network but it’s only for first responders. In emergencies FirstNet users receive priority.

Does anybody collect data on how often this happens? I bailed on Verizon for Spectrum Mobile a few months ago and have noticed zero difference, aside from a drastically lower bill.

If I had to guess, it is about as public as google's core algorithms.

They want you looking at the orange and purple 'coverage maps' and declaring 'its the same'...

As others have said, carriers do definitely "de-prioritize" traffic for some users. In general, this isn't about cross-carrier traffic (ie, AT&T v's T-Mobile), but as a way of differentiation between the carriers different plans, plus those from "MVNOs" (Mobile Network Virtual Operators - basically all of the carriers except T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon who are in turn buying service from one or more of those carriers).

Exactly how they split things varies between carriers. however you can see a great summary of the current situation at https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/..._carriers_and/

However there's an important distinction between 'data' and 'voice' that's relevant to the OPs question. All of this de-prioritization only applies to "data", and it does not apply to voice calls. Voice calls get assigned to a different level of service that is higher than data, and will almost always result in the same quality regardless of whether you're using the underlying provider or an MVNO, and regardless of how your data traffic is being prioritized. (Technically in 4G/5G everything is data, but the data stream that is used for voice calls is what gets the different QCI level). So the answer to the question about "phone call quality" is that no, that will not vary based on the users identity, but data transfer speed/latency very certainly can!

As far as I know there are still some pockets where T-Mobile will roam to AT&T. Plus you've got areas like Alaska where both will roam to another local carrier. They also sometimes enable such roaming during/after disasters when networks are impacted. But yes, it's certainly not a normal situation.

Fwiw, prioritization has been part of cellular networks since the analog (AMPS) days. Even in the 1980s, different users had different priorities on the network, although the priority was set on the device itself rather than the network understanding who the user was. The carrier would program the user's (phone's) priority level into the phone at the store before the customer walked out the door with it.

As others have mentioned, the big three (ATT, VZW, T-Mob) all have independent hardware (antennas, transceivers) that just co-locate on the same towers. MVNOs lease capacity from them and have contracts that vary wildly but for the most part don't have the full functionality of the big 3. In some locations there are more than just the big three (like US Cellular which I think still maintains their own network).

I have a friend who manages a company that services the HVAC units for cell towers. He took me on a tour once, it was quite fascinating. All of the big 3 use different rack setups, but they're basically the same on every tower.

Here's a list of MVNOs for the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...work_operators

US Cellular has a native network in parts of the country. They roam onto Verizon in large swathes of the country where they don't have a native network (native network is mostly midwest and parts of the east I think).

THere are also a ton of little regional celluar companies who do have some subscribers but gain most of their revenue with roaming agreements that help the big 3 fill out their coverage. C-Spire and Bluegrass Cellular come to mind, though I think Verizon bought the latter and they are no more.