Following yesterday’s reports that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse confirmed that the carrier throttled speeds for the top 1% of users, the carrier was forced to issue a statement today denying the reports as incorrect and has laid out its policies in the below statement:
- Sprint does not throttle any postpaid phone data users for on-network or off-network usage. Sprint is the only national carrier offering smartphone users truly unlimited data with no throttling, metering or overages while on the Sprint network.
- Sprint does have terms and conditions which prohibit certain types of data use that may impair other customers’ usage or harm or interfere with the network. At yesterday’s investor conference, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse was referring to Sprint’s right to terminate service of data abusers who violate Sprint’s terms and conditions.
- Customers who abuse our network by violating the terms and conditions will be contacted by Sprint in an effort to have the customer change their usage to comply with their subscriber agreement. Customers who do not change their usage and remain in violation of the terms and conditions may be subject to actions reserved by Sprint, including but not limited to termination. Consistent with our advertising, engaging in such uses will not result in throttling for customers on unlimited data-included plans for phones.
This also follows reports that inferred Sprint’s data roaming policies were the cause of the initial throttling reports and have since been corrected to reflect current limits and usage terms regarding handset data access.
While Sprint is the only carrier with unlimited data access on smartphones out of all of the US carriers and uses it as its main selling point, policies are in place to manage cases of excessive use, such policies are common across all carriers and not exclusive to Sprint, nor do they constitute throttling in the conventional and current sense.
