This practice will be applied to Unlimted Data plans with the carrier. This is not unheard of – throttling of data (making data speeds go slower after you’ve used a certain amount) – is something that most major data networks have been guilty of in the past. But you would really have to try to get in Sprint’s sights; customers won’t see a slowdown until they hit 23 gigabytes per month, or enough data to stream all five seasons of “Game of Thrones” every month. The average user consumes about 3GB of data per month.
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Sprint’s policy change comes as the carrier, which over the summer slipped to the No. 4 position, struggles to improve its service amid tough competition from rivals AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.
“At Sprint, we give customers what they want – and they want the option of unlimited data”, said Claure in a statement.
T-Mobile also offers an unlimited data plan that will de-prioritize customers that use more than 23GB per month, so it’s not terribly surprising to see Sprint put this new policy into effect.
AT&T and Verizon abandoned their unlimited-data plans years ago, complaining they were economically unviable as consumers started to use more data.
Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure hinted the price increase was tied to costs associated with supporting unlimited data services. While it attracts new customers, many of them tend to be the heaviest data users. John Saw published a blog post – titled “Protecting the 97%” – outlining the specifics today.
Carrier throttling is a somewhat controversial practice, and one that recently came under fire from federal regulators.
Sprint in June reportedly told the FCC it stopped limiting network speeds of its customers on unlimited data plans inline with the adoption of the FCC’s net neutrality rules.
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Sprint at the time did state that it reserved the right to regulate network traffic depending on a customer’s rate plan. “That’s a lot of data”, Saw said. While unlimited for a few basically means they use 5-10GB of data a month, there are a few who abuse the unlimited plans and use it to tether other devices, consuming way more data in the process and potentially hogging the bandwidth.
