Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Sprint: We’re Not Really Throttling Our Customers

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse stirred up a mini firestorm on Thursday when he assured investors at a financial conference that it had a way of dealing with those gobbling up too much data.

“For those that want to abuse it, we can knock them off,” Hesse said, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report. The report also said the carrier was slowing the speeds of about 1 percent of its most data-hungry customers.

However, in a blog post on Friday, the carrier insisted that it is not slowing down the speeds of any of its customers on traditional postpaid contract plans.

“Reports that Sprint throttles the top one percent of data users are false,” Sprint said in the post. “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.”

Hesse’s comments raised a lot of eyebrows given that Sprint has spent a fortune on ads reminding Americans that it is not charging overages like AT&T or Verizon Wireless, nor is it slowing the speeds of those who use a lot of data, as does T-Mobile USA.

Sprint said it contacts customers doing things like using a ton of off-network data or tethering their devices, but says it reserves the right to terminate customers that don’t change that behavior. “Consistent with our advertising, engaging in such uses will not result in throttling for customers on unlimited data-included plans for phones.”

Also, as we’ve reported, the company is exploring using so-called throttling on its Virgin Mobile prepaid brand.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik