“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.

The company announced in July that it would start in October to reduce the data speeds of customers who used more than 2.5GB of data in a given month. Virgin Mobile said at the time that the move would affect fewer than 3 percent of its customers, who would then have their access returned to full speed the following month.

Today the company said it had delayed that plan until sometime in 2012. The announcement was noted, almost as a footnote, at the bottom of a press release announcing two new Android phones coming to the prepaid brand.

Asked to explain the move, a Virgin Mobile representative told AllThingsD, “We have decided to delay the reduction of data speeds until 2012 to ensure we have all the necessary systems in place so that our customer experience will remain positive.”

The company didn’t say when in 2012 the move would take place, but the representative said that the company “will provide further information on timing beforehand so our customers have advance notification.”

T-Mobile has relied on throttling extensively to manage data use on its network, while both AT&T and Verizon largely rely on overage charges to deal with those who exceed their data plan in a given month.

“Customers will incur overages of $0.10 per MB when they exceed 200MB of data ($10 for 100MB) up to a maximum monthly payment of $40 with both Value and Classic plans for data including the 200MB add-on fee,” T-Mobile said in a statement. The company typically charges between $5 to $10 for its basic data plan, which includes just 200MB of monthly data usage.

T-Mobile said it will start notifying customers when they reach 90 percent of that level, and then again when they hit the 200MB limit, offering them the option to move to a higher-end data plan. The changes are effective Aug. 14, T-Mobile said.

For those who want unlimited data, T-Mobile is now pushing people toward one of its other data plans, including a plan that includes 2GB of high-speed data (and data at 2G speeds for those who go over the limit). That plan starts at $10 for those on one of its new “value” plans, which offer lower prices to those who bring their own phone or pay full price for the device.

Carriers have been trying to come to grips with an explosion in data traffic. In general, T-Mobile’s approach has been to offer unlimited data, but to slow customers significantly once they hit a certain level of use. Verizon and AT&T have largely moved away from unlimited data plans as well, instead offering plans with various data limits, with customers incurring overage charges for data use above the limits. Sprint is the lone company among the major carriers still offering unlimited data plans with no throttling or overage charges.

The change to T-Mobile’s data rate structure was reported earlier by TmoNews, a site specializing in news about the carrier.

Confirming a report in 9to5Mac yesterday, the carrier said Friday that it will soon throttle its heaviest data users as part of an effort to alleviate congestion on its network.

“Like other wireless companies, we’re taking steps to manage exploding demand for mobile data,” the company explained in a statement. “Many experts agree the country is facing a serious wireless spectrum crunch. We’re responding on many levels, including investing billions in our wireless network this year and working to acquire additional network capacity. We’re also taking additional, more immediate measures to help address network congestion.”

And so, beginning Oct. 1, customers on an unlimited plan whose monthly use puts them into the top 5 percent of data consumption may have their data speeds reduced until the end of that billing cycle. Normal speeds will resume at the beginning of the next cycle.

Just as T-Mobile did before it, AT&T insists the move will affect only a small subset of its customers, while improving service for everyone else. “These customers on average use 12 times more data than the average of all other smartphone data customers,” AT&T said in a statement. “This step will not apply to our 15 million smartphone customers on a tiered data plan or the vast majority of smartphone customers who still have unlimited data plans. … To rank among the top 5 percent, you have to use an extraordinary amount of data in a single billing period.”

Something for users of Spotify, Netflix and Hulu to consider…

Sprint, the last major carrier still offering completely unlimited smartphone data plans, said on Wednesday that it intends to start throttling data speeds for customers on its prepaid Virgin Mobile brand, starting some time in October.

While the move has no direct impact on Sprint-brand customers, it shows that the carrier is at least dipping its toe into metered data. Specifically, Virgin Mobile customers will start to see a major cut in their data rates once they have used 2.5 gigabytes in a particular month. Full speed will be restored the following month, Virgin said, and the company won’t charge any overages.

“Based on current usage patterns, fewer than three percent of Virgin Mobile USA customers use more than 2.5GB of data usage per month,” Virgin Mobile said in a statement. “After reaching this level, this minority of customers may experience slower page loads, file downloads and streaming media.”

Once customers hit their limit, their speeds will be limited to 256 kilobits per second or below for the remainder of that plan cycle.

T-Mobile pioneered the use of implementing speed downgrades once users hit a certain threshold. AT&T and, earlier this month, Verizon, have also moved away from unlimited data, though they charge overage fees rather than slowing speeds once users hit their cap.

“We are all facing the same situation and this is the best way for Virgin Mobile to maintain the best network experience as data usage explodes,” Virgin Mobile President David Trimble said in a statement.

However, by shifting away from unlimited data, the burden has moved onto consumers to try to estimate how much data they are using, a task that many find confusing.

Separately, Virgin Mobile also ended a $10 monthly surcharge for BlackBerry devices but raised the base price of its Beyond Talk plans by $5 to $10 per month.

The company confirmed that, starting Thursday, new customers will have to choose one of several usage-based data pricing plans.

The plans start at $10 for 75MB of data for feature phones, with smartphone plans ranging from $30 for 2GB all the way to an $80 plan that includes 10GB of data each month, far more than typically used these days by even heavy data users.

Those who have an unlimited plan today can keep it through their contract, and Verizon said that existing customers who are no longer under contract can still upgrade to a new smartphone, sign a new two-year agreement and keep their unlimited plan.

Though the all-you-can-eat approach is popular with customers, carriers have been itching to move away from unlimited plans in order to be able to handle an explosion in data use and because a small number of customers have been using an inordinate amount of data, streaming copious amounts of video and performing other data-intensive tasks.

“Unlimited billing on data is simply unsustainable for the industry,” Verizon VP Nicola Palmer said at a conference earlier this year.

The challenge for many consumers, though, is predicting and understanding their data use. Carriers have offered a number of tools, including calculators that predict data use based on planned tasks as well as alerts that let a customer know when he or she is approaching a data limit.

AT&T led the charge away from unlimited plans last year, while T-Mobile has taken a different approach, throttling down the data rate once users hit their limit, but not charging customers overage fees. Sprint, meanwhile, continues to offer a range of unlimited data plans with its phones.

The new pricing lines up with information that had leaked out last month and was confirmed earlier on Tuesday by online wireless industry publication FierceWireless.

The two-year contract plan is being offered in addition to a pricier $99 plan that doesn’t start throttling data speeds until a user hits 5GB of data.

For those who don’t have a television or who fast-forward through all the commercials, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has been all over the airwaves touting his dictionary skills and how the definition of “unlimited” shouldn’t include overage charges or throttling. (Sprint has, however, added a $10 monthly surcharge for smartphones.)

T-Mobile touted the new option as offering a better value, saying customers can save more than $350 a year using its new plan, as compared to rivals.

“Consumers today are looking for even more value and flexibility from their wireless plans,” T-Mobile Senior VP John Clelland said in a statement. “While data plans for many of our competitors continue to be very expensive, T-Mobile is lowering the price of our unlimited plan and offering more options, making it easier than ever for customers to step up to a richer mobile data experience on our 4G network.”

As for the throttling, T-Mobile noted that the slower speeds are only for the remainder of the billing cycle and that its smartphone customers use, on average, about 1GB of data per month.

The industry has been struggling over what to do with unlimited pricing, especially in a business where there is limited capacity. Verizon and AT&T have been moving toward tiered pricing, though Verizon has been offering a limited-time unlimited option for the iPhone and other devices. Sprint, meanwhile, has tried to use unlimited options as a way to stand out from the pack and perhaps gain some ground.

The policy is effective immediately and is intended to ensure that average data users aren’t negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users. Says Verizon, “If you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5 percent of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand.”

What constitutes an “extraordinary amount of data”? Verizon doesn’t say, but I’m sure its subscribers will know it when they hit it, because their speeds will drop for almost two billing cycles.

And to think that just a few weeks ago, Verizon was talking up its plan to offer iPhone buyers a $30 unlimited data plan. Evidently it applies to the amount of data only, not the rate at which it’s downloaded.

Verizon says the shift in policy has nothing to do with the looming debut of the iPhone (“There’s nothing magic about the timing.”), which is widely known to tax carrier networks. But the timing here makes it hard to believe. This is Verizon bracing itself for the iPhone data deluge.

“It’s very obvious that we are pushing the limits of the amount of capacity we have,” Jacobs said, adding that network neutrality regulations should not restrict operators’ ability to manage their networks.

“Operators should have the ability to say: ‘let’s be fair, this person’s moved a lot of data, this person’s used a little’, if they’re paying the same amount, then the person who’s used less will get more access….We are on the side of, yes, you have to be able to do something to manage your network, but it’s not the right thing to go in and say one service or another is OK.”

In other words, Qualcomm (QCOM) favors usage-based throttling. In theory, this should ensure that all customers get their fair share of bandwidth every hour of the day. In practice, however, it has meant something else entirely. So the question remains: If data traffic is to be shaped (and I am not saying that it should be), who will determine how it will be shaped and, more importantly, who can be trusted to make that determination fairly?

Jacobs’s remarks come a day after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski reiterated the Obama administration’s call for network neutrality.

The Federal Communications Commission isn’t buying Comcast’s (CMCSA) argument that throttling or degrading the performance of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service BitTorrent on its broadband network is a necessary traffic-management technique.

Speaking at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he’s considering taking action against the cable operator for violating the agency’s network-neutrality principles. Seems Martin was troubled by Comcast’s dissembling around the BitTorrent issue, not to mention its efforts to pack an FCC hearing on Net neutrality with its own employees.

“A hallmark of what should be seen as a reasonable business practice is certainly whether or not the people engaging in that practice are willing to describe it publicly,” said Martin, adding that the incident offered the commission a good opportunity to establish a precedent for future cases of this kind. “I have said in the past the commission is ready, willing and able to take action on individual complaints,” he said. “I think that is what we are going to end up doing, and I think that will end up setting an important precedent going forward: that we are willing to address individual complaints when they come in.”

The moves come at a time of growing institutional shareholder dissatisfaction with Comcast (CMCSA). The cable operator’s shares are down nearly 40% in the past year and off by 25% since it gave disappointing 2007 financial guidance in the fall. Suffice it to say, the company’s shareholders are not happy. In a Jan. 14 letter to Comcast, investment firm Chieftain Capital Management accused management of strategic missteps and called CEO Brian (son of Ralph) Roberts’s stewardship of the company over the past decade a Comcastrophe. “The management of this company and supervision by its board have been a ‘Comcastrophe’ for shareholders over the past decade,” Chieftain wrote. “We want and deserve the best CEO Comcast’s board of directors can find–and, based on his record, Brian Roberts is not it.”

Will the concessions Comcast has made to its shareholders silence calls for Roberts’s head? Perhaps. It’s tough to shout epithets at management when the company’s just posted a better-than-expected 54% jump in fourth-quarter net income and announced plans for its first dividend in nearly a decade.

The moves come at a time of growing institutional shareholder dissatisfaction with Comcast (CMCSA). The cable operator’s shares are down nearly 40% in the past year and off by 25% since it gave disappointing 2007 financial guidance in the fall. Suffice it to say, the company’s shareholders are not happy. In a Jan. 14 letter to Comcast, investment firm Chieftain Capital Management accused management of strategic missteps and called CEO Brian (son of Ralph) Roberts’s stewardship of the company over the past decade a Comcastrophe. “The management of this company and supervision by its board have been a ‘Comcastrophe’ for shareholders over the past decade,” Chieftain wrote. “We want and deserve the best CEO Comcast’s board of directors can find–and, based on his record, Brian Roberts is not it.”

Will the concessions Comcast has made to its shareholders silence calls for Roberts’s head? Perhaps. It’s tough to shout epithets at management when the company’s just posted a better-than-expected 54% jump in fourth-quarter net income and announced plans for its first dividend in nearly a decade.