Virgin Mobile (USA) To Begin Throttling 3% Of Data Hungry Customers This March
A few months ago we reported Virgin Mobile USA’s plans to begin throttling their customers back in October but that plan never came to fruition. Instead, Virgin Mobile delayed the inevitable throttling to sometime in 2012. Well, now the pay-as-you-go service provider is officially announcing their plans to introduce throttling (for real-sies this time), come March 23rd.
According to Virgin Mobile, only 3% of their customer base will be affected which doesn’t sound too bad at all. Reduced speeds of around 256Kbps of data will affect all individuals who use over 2.5GB of data in a month. These users will receive a friendly text message from VM, warning them of the sh*t storm to befall upon them as they wait 4+ minutes for Phandroid.com to load on their web browsers (and another 7 minutes attempting to close the subsequent popup ad).
Throttling is the new black with cellphone service providers. The ever increasing demand of data hungry smartphones chomping through data like an 80’s videogame icon has proven too much for any 1 carrier to handle. Currently, only Sprint remains but who knows how long that will last with no mention of “truly” unlimited data coming to their recently announced 4G LTE network later this year.
Anyone of our readers out there who were once thinking about heading over to Virgin Mobile having second thoughts? Or is 2.5GB of data more than enough for your usage?
[Via PhoneScoop]