Sprint tried to be cool and to be a little disruptive as well as to hang as other carriers capped how much data users consumed each month. Apparently, it has had enough of the three-percenters hogging up its network's bandwidth and has finally decide to throttle the speed demons.
There's an occupy movement that has been going on. And this one has received little attention from the media and virtually no protest. Data usage across the industry has been "skyrocketing," as three-percenter occupy more than their fair share of bandwidth, according to John Saw, Sprint's chief technology officer.
"One way we aim to make the customer experience better is to protect against the possibility that a small minority of customers might occupy an unreasonable share of network resources," says Saw.
Effective a few days ago, Oct. 16, customers who sign up for a new unlimited data plan, that includes upgrades, will have a 23 GB ceiling over their heads. Once their data usage hit 23 GB, Sprint will throttle them and down shift them to low-priority network profiles. Essentially, everyone else's requests for data will supersede theirs.
"The 23GB threshold is typical in the industry and other carriers have already implemented a similar practice," Saw says. "We agree this is a smart approach towards making sure a small number of customers don't adversely impact the experience for others."
Sprint reasons that 23 GB of data is enough to send 6,000 emails with attachments, view 1,500 web pages, share 600 photos, stream 60 hours of music and stream 50 hours of video.
The rest of Sprint Unlimited data account will be presumably transitioned to the new system once their contracts expire.
Sprint now joins the US other three major carriers in cap the amount their subscribers consume.
Back in August, T-Mobile took more aggressive measures in cracking down on members of the three percenters.
Some people use hacks and workaround to hide their heavy usage of tethering, T-Mobile said in August. Such behavior could compromise the experience of other subscribers, it reasoned.
"Customers who continue to do this will be warned," said T-Mobile. "If they choose not to stop, they'll lose access to our Unlimited 4G LTE smartphone data plan and be moved to an entry-level limited 4G LTE data plan."
