Sprint sprints away from no-throttle policy – punishes 'unlimited' network hoggers

Sprint has confirmed plans to once again throttle data usage of customers who go over a 23GB limit each month.

The company, which is the fourth largest mobile carrier in the US with nearly 58 million subscribers on its books, said that it was "unfair" to allow such behaviour to continue unchallenged, given that 97 per cent of its subscriber base did not hog the network's bandwidth.

Sprint recently expressed concerns about punishing download hogs – citing America's new net neutrality rules. In fact, it binned its "network management technique" in June this year, only to U-turn on that decision just yesterday.

As of now, customers who "occupy an unreasonable share of network resources" will see the service throttled for the remainder of their monthly billing cycle, warned Sprint CTO John Saw.

It seems, then, that Sprint simply yanked its previous policy to bring in a different version that might just satisfy regulators at the US Federal Communications Commission.

Rivals, such as T-Mobile, in the US similarly choke heavy users on on their network, Saw noted in a blog post.

"We are introducing a new Quality of Service (QoS) practice that applies to customers who choose an unlimited data handset plan launched 16 October 2015, or after, or customers who choose to upgrade their handset on or after 16 October and remain on an existing unlimited data plan," he said.

In other words, unlimited ain't quite so unlimited for three per cent of Sprint subscribers. That's to say, roughly 1.7 million US netizens will be throttled on the network once they go over the 23GB threshold. ®