Sprint isn’t the only carrier to do this, of course: AT&T will throttle users’ unlimited LTE connections if they’re over 5GB of data consumed per month during periods of network congestion. Sprint will once again slow down the speeds of its heaviest data users, but only at times when the company’s cellular network is congested.
Advertisement
Sprint, the nation’s fourth-largest cellular carrier, announced on Friday that it will begin throttling connection speeds of unlimited data customers chewing through more than 23GB of data in a monthly billing period. You really need to work to get in Sprint’s sights, though. Sprint customers that were on an unlimited plan prior to October 16 will be subject to the QoS policy when they upgrade their phone and remain on an existing unlimited data plan. While it attracts new customers, many of them tend to be the heaviest users of data. T-Mobile and Sprint continued to offer unlimited data plans to all customers in an effort to attract customers from their two bigger rivals.
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. The company raised the price of its unlimited plan by this month.
“At Sprint, we give customers what they want – and they want the option of unlimited data”, said Claure in a statement.
Unlimited data is a double-edged sword for the carriers.
Carrier throttling is a somewhat controversial practice, and one that recently came under fire from federal regulators. In June, Verizon also stopped slowing unlimited data traffic for 3G customers.
Sprint defended its new policy.
And even then, Sprint is emphasizing that those customers will see decreased speeds only when a particular cell tower is constrained.
AT&T notes that “speed reductions will occur only when the customer is using his or her device at times and in areas where there is network congestion and only for the remainder of the current billing cycle after the customer has exceeded the 22 GB data usage threshold”.
Advertisement
Sprint says it measures cell site performance in real time, with “prioritization” being “applied or removed every 20 milliseconds”.
