“I think it is much to-do about nothing,” Sprint VP Fared Adib told AllThingsD in an interview on Tuesday. Customers sign up for two-year contracts, Adib said, and it makes sense for customers who want to have the latest technology get a device that will meet their needs throughout that time. People should be more concerned if Sprint weren’t doing that, he said.

“We’ve done this before,” he said. “So has every other carrier.”

Adib noted that Sprint’s LTE deployment, which will start with a few cities around midyear, will be faster than the rollout of prior technologies, including its 2G, 3G and WiMax networks.

Speaking of WiMax, Sprint may not be introducing new phones for its flagship brand, but it is now extending that technology to its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile prepaid services. Virgin and Boost both announced plans to start selling a WiMax device from HTC. (Virgin has a variant of the Evo 3D, while Boost will sell a phone similar to the traditional Evo 4G.)

The company has said it plans to continue offering WiMax service through at least 2015.

Also on Tuesday, Sprint announced a new bundle of family safety and security applications under the Sprint Guardian banner. The effort consists of a $10 per month service from Location Labs’ Safely unit and a $5 per month security service from Lookout.

Both services cover up to five devices, which could be a savings for families that have a bunch of Sprint phones.

Adding such services can help increase loyalty to Sprint among families with multiple devices — already a traditionally loyal group and a key source of revenue for all the major carriers.

“You might change phones and plans but you don’t change carriers,” Adib said of those customers.

One area where Sprint hasn’t been all that aggressive is in introducing devices running Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system. Adib said that Sprint certainly took note of the slow initial sales globally for the first crop of Windows Phones.

Still, Adib said that the company is a longtime partner of Microsoft’s and expects to offer future Windows Phones, likely after the debut of Windows Phone 8.

“I don’t want to give you any specific dates,” he said.

But he said he is “very bullish” on Windows Phone overall and said the company has rapidly closed some of the gaps it had in terms of performance and capabilities. Adib said he has also been pleased to see the work Nokia has done in reintroducing itself in the U.S. with its first Lumia devices.

“I think we are going to continue to see that,” he said.

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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.

In a new series of ads, Sprint lampoons T-Mobile’s pink-dress-clad spokeswoman as “contractually obligated” to hang out with the stodgy AT&T guy. The ads also aim to position Virgin Mobile’s talk and data plans as the best in the business.

“It’s a competitive market and we’re not going to shy away from an opportunity to debate things publicly so that consumers can see both sides of a story,” said Virgin Mobile marketing VP Bob Stohrer.

Technically, the campaign is a parody of a parody, since T-Mobile’s ads themselves were a take-off of Apple’s “I’m a Mac” spots. Sprint is not the first to try that technique, with merger opponent Free Press also using a parody of the ads to make its case.

The ads don’t make mention of Virgin Mobile’s recent announcement that it will soon start throttling the data speeds of customers who go over a certain threshold — a method of limiting data popularized by T-Mobile.

Update: In a statement, T-Mobile communications director Hernan Daguerre said that the ads prove that T-mobile’s no-contract plans are putting pressure on Virgin.

“And this is because consumers looking for a great prepaid rate plan also want cutting-edge devices on a nationwide 4G network, which is exactly what they get from T-Mobile,” Daguerre said. “It’s flattering to see their marketing efforts center around our advertising properties, but consumers will see right through their gimmicks.”