Sprint WiMAX WaTCH: Will They Throttle?
The Consumerist and Gizmodo report that Sprint plants on placing caps and throttles on their WiMAX service. In other words: expect the same sort of soft caps on data usage and for data to potentially slow down when you go beyond it. Bad news, but may not so bad for Windows Mobile followers given that there won't actually be any smartphones released on the network in the foreseeable future anyway. Laptop cards on the newly live Baltimore portion of the network are working fine.
However, in our forums we're getting reader reports that Sprint claims they won't throttle data in any way, shape or form. The data service clocks in at $45 a month(see below), which isn't too bad but definitely doesn't feel as nice as their recent standard EVDO tethering price drop.
We were seriously hoping that with 4G, "unlimited" would really mean unlimited. If Sprint is serious about capping and throttling their XOHM service, we'll likely turn our lonely eyes to Verizon and AT&T's pending LTE services -- not that we'll see anything we like there on the bandwidth front, either.
Update: Draiko does us a solid in the comments: "Actually, the pricing for the first 6 months is $30 per month for mobile, $25 per month for home, and $50 per month for 2 devices. Much tastier." Tastier indeed.
