Sprint Starts Throttling ‘Unlimited’ Subscribers

Saw said that today only around 3 percent of its postpaid subscribers “are using overwhelmingly disproportionate network resources”. 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.

Overall this does seem like the fairest way to manage network health during periods of congestion – instead of hitting users with data caps and overages fees, just throttle the biggest users’ connections until the period of congestion is over.

John Saw, chief technology officer at Sprint, says in a blog post that the new practice aims “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”.

Sprint last month announced that beginning October. 16 it would be increasing the price of its unlimited data plan by $10 per month.

The company said that excessive unlimited users ruin the experience for those around them.

T-Mobile also throttles its users after 23 GB of data usage, and both AT&T and Verizon cut their unlimited data plans, making the discussion about throttling a little less important.

Unlimited data is a double-edged sword for carriers. For the current move, a Sprint spokeswoman said the carrier was more specifically targeting new customers.

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.

Carrier throttling is a somewhat controversial practice, and one that recently came under fire from federal regulators.

Sprint at the time did state that it reserved the right to regulate network traffic depending on a customer’s rate plan. The prioritization that’ll throttle these users is applied and removed every 20 seconds, Sprint explains, and heavy data users will see their network performance return to normal once the network is no longer congested or if they move to a non-constrained site.