According to Saw, throttling will kick in when a cell tower is congested, which will lead to decreased speeds. Regardless, 23GB is still rather generous, especially when you consider that a very small percentage of unlimited data customers actually use that much data in a month.
“Performance for the affected customer returns to normal as soon as traffic on the cell site also returns to normal, or the customer moves to a non-constrained site,” wrote Saw.
The throttling is exacerbated if you live in a major city, where cell towers tend to get frequently congested, which could annoy some unlimited data customers. That annoyance starts to increase when one considers that Sprint reportedly stopped throttling unlimited data customers almost as soon as the FCC’s net neutrality rules went into effect back in June.
Thankfully, Sprint’s new “Quality of Service” practice will only apply to customers either signing up of renewing their unlimited plans. As such, you should be fine until you upgrade your phone.
This won’t be the first time Sprint gets some heat for how it handles its data. Back in July, Sprint announced its $80 All-In plan, which comprised of a $60 plan with unlimited talk, text, and data, and a $20 plan that lets customers lease a phone. The problem was in the fine print, which stated that data speeds would be throttled to 600Kbps if customers streamed videos.
Sprint did remove that limitation, though the carrier said it reserves the right to slow speeds down if the network is congested.
