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Though Sprint, the United States' newest iPhone carrier, has been running advertisements touting its "truly unlimited" network, the carrier is throttling smartphone customers who use "excessive" amounts of data, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
For those that want to abuse it, we can knock them off," [Sprint CEO Dan] Hesse said at an investor conference Thursday. He said Sprint pares back data use for about 1% of users, a practice known as throttling.
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"You'd be shocked how much data you use in a month," Sprint asks in a recent television advertisement. "What happens if you go over? With Sprint, you don't have to worry; only Sprint offers truly unlimited data."
Hesse did say there were no plans for Sprint to move to tiered data plans like Verizon and AT&T have switched to in recent years, however it appears that there is no longer any US carrier that offers "truly unlimited" data plans for the iPhone.
Update: As pointed out by TechCrunch, Dow Jones seems to have misinterpreted Hesse. The throttling only applies to customers who use excessive data while roaming on partnered networks -- "a guy in his house in rural Montana" for example. Sprint's fine print notes the carrier will begin throttling after 300 MB of "off-network" data usage.
Update 2: Sprint has now clarified the situation with a blog post indicating the carrier does not throttle any customer's data usage, even for those with excessive roaming usage. The carrier does, however, have terms in place that permit it to terminate the contracts of users with heavy roaming usage, and it attempts to reach out to those customers and work with them before terminating their contracts.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Correct, using as much data as you want on an unlimited plan is definitely abuse.
Why do all the carriers in the US suck?
I use my iPhone quite a lot and I reset it over a month ago. Since then it's reporting it has downloaded 154MB of data.
Can someone explain what these excessive users actually find to download on their phones that puts them in the top 1%?
Someone on MR posted that they purposely ran Pandora all night long on mute...those are the kind of people that made this happen
Occupy: Sprint
If they allow you to use as much data as you want a month regardless if its throttled or not, its still technically unlimited right?
Should read there is no truly Un-throttled data plans for iPhone users in the U.S.