“This practice is meant to protect against a small minority of unlimited customers who use high volumes of data and unreasonably take up network resources during times when the network is constrained”, said John Saw, Sprint’s chief technology officer. “That’s a lot of data”, Saw said. This was, of course, around the time of the controversy surrounding net neutrality, which ended up classifying Sprint as a common carrier under Title II, blocking the company from being able to tweak customers’ data connections.
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Sprint had previously attempted to throttle heavy users, going after the top 5 percent of its subscribers each month, but it suspended that policy in June.
AT&T and Verizon abandoned their unlimited data plans years ago, complaining they were economically unviable as consumers started to use more data.
Sprint is following T-Mobile’s lead again, but not in a way that will make a few unlimited data users happy. Those customers will see their network speeds reduced, though will still continue to have access to unlimited data.
The news comes a few months after Sprint was criticized for trying to limit how much data customers could use for things like streaming video, even though it advertised its data plans as being unlimited. T-Mobile USA, for instance, says in its terms and conditions it will deprioritize unlimited customers that exceed the 23 GB limit.
Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure hinted the price increase was tied to costs associated with supporting unlimited data services. For the current move, a Sprint spokeswoman said the carrier was more specifically targeting new customers. The FCC also challenged Verizon when the company planned to expand its data throttling policy to its 4G customers.
As of today, regulators haven’t commented on Sprint’s new plan.
Sprint today announced what it calls a Quality of Service (QoS) policy that’ll prioritize heavy unlimited data users below everyone else when Sprint’s network is constrained.
Sprint says it measures cell site performance in real time, with “prioritization” being “applied or removed every 20 milliseconds”.
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The practice will cut down on data speed once a user has used more than 23GB of data in one billing cycle.
