Sprint: Our 'unlimited' mobe plan has one tiny limit: High-quality video

US phone carrier Sprint is offering an unlimited data plan that carries one important caveat: throttled data rates for video. The carrier's All-In smartphone plan charges users $80 per month with no limit on voice or data usage. Streaming video, however, will be slowed to a crawl, thanks to a limit holding video to "3G" data …

[frank ly]

What about torrent downloads?

Just download and then watch at your leisure.

[fruitoftheloon]

@Frank ly: Re: What about torrent downloads?

Frank,

methinks that grandma and bubba may find getting stuff from torrents a little more challenging than Netflix...

Torrenting etc is fine for us techies and the 'yewf', but f'all use for most other folk!

Jay

[JetSetJim]

Re: What about torrent downloads?

Or just run it through a VPN.

Wasn't there a fella who demonstrated that another US ISP throttled video by doing this?

[Kanhef]

Why

Because video is easily the largest use of data. If all of Sprint's customers were watching Netflix at the same time, they'd be pulling 80 terabits per second across the network - some 200 times as much as the largest DDOS attacks ever recorded.

[Ashton Black]

Re: Why

The implication is, that they shouldn't offer "unlimited" if it isn't. If they don't have the capacity to actually do "unlimited" then why do they get away with lying to their customers?

[Tikimon]

History repeating again...

I started my online adventure with AOL's walled portal and $3.00 per minute dial-up rate. I jumped ship to Earthlink for an unlimited plan. The only way to compete was to offer a flat monthly cost for unlimited access, so everyone climbed aboard.

The ISPs were victims of their own success, and could not deliver to all the subscribers they had signed up. Having promised too much they wanted to claw some of it back even then.

Twenty years later, same old thing. The telcos oversell something they can't deliver, then try to screw us out of what we have paid for. Tip: Don't offer a product you CANNOT DELIVER.

[cs94njw]

Re: History repeating again...

At least when they overbook capacity on an airplane, they'll put you on the next flight out, and give you a free plane ticket.

[ewilts]

That performance sucks

And here I sit with my S6 on T-Mobile at my office - on 4G LTE with WiFi off - and Speedtest reports a download speed of 47.20 Mbps and an upload speed of 18.39 Mbps.

[DubyaG]

LTE, yeah right.

"The carrier says that, on average, its LTE connections clock in at 3-6Mbps with peaks of more than 10Mbps"

And finding a spot where LTE works can be quite challenging unless you are in a Metro area. I usually see 1xRTT or 1x800. But Sprint is CHEEP! CHEEP! compared to Verizon or AT&T.

[Michael Wojcik]

Sounds good to me

I quite like the sound of this package. The less bandwidth-wasting video on the network I'm using, the better.

Pity it's being offered by Sprint. I used Sprint for the first few years I had a mobile phone. Not an experience I'm inclined to repeat.

These days, I just use an unlocked GSM phone on an MVNO running over AT&T's network. Hardly perfect, but a decent compromise - much cheaper than equivalent plans from the big operators, no contracts, easy to slip in a PAYG SIM when I'm out of the country.