Sprint Throttles Customers, Well, Sort Of

Sprint had a bit of a mix up earlier today at their investor conference. CEO Dan Hesse said that the company limits the data of 1 percent of it’s users. However, there seems to be a bit confusion regarding the throttling. Executive Dan White said that wasn’t the case, at least with Sprint customers.

When it comes to them providing their services to prepaid companies such as Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile, yes, they do throttle those customers. Whether this is the truth or not, it begs one to wonder if they’re truly getting unlimited data.

“Sprint has repeatedly stripped away the unlimited offer from many of its services except for its core contract smartphone data plan. Over the past year, the company has done away with unlimited plans for its prepaid business, mobile hot spots, and USB laptop cards.”

The reality is that the unlimited offering from the company is really the only differentiator they have moving forward. With the likes of Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, if they were to lose unlimited or not even lose it, but more stories about throttling were to appear, this could be a nail in the coffin for the company.

While people don’t like data caps, surely there’s a subset of consumers who would take a data cap over having their data connection throttled. With all of that said, it seems to have just been a mistake from the CEO and he should have been more specific, otherwise Sprint potentially reminds me of the unlimited web hosting plans…not truly unlimited.