Cricket Wireless will start throttling its Unlimited Data plans on April 2, the wireless service provider announced in a press release on Sunday. The AT&T-owned company spent two days prior to its announcement notifying its existing subscribers on the Unlimited Data plan that they’ll soon start getting throttled once they reach a certain data cap. The firm refers to this move as “congestion management” and said that it could impose a soft data cap on all users who reach 22GB of data in a single billing cycle. The changes will take place on April 2, the Atlanta, Georgia-based company revealed.
Following the announcement, Cricket Wireless was quick to point out that its data congestion management efforts won’t necessarily affect all users. Like the name implies, only users who are connected to a congested network and have already surpassed the 22GB cap in their current billing cycle could experience throttling. Furthermore, they’ll be able to avoid the throttling by simply leaving the area covered by the congested network, the AT&T-owned wireless carrier revealed. While the exact circumstances in which Cricket Wireless will resort to these measures may vary, network congestion in general refers to cases in which network nodes can’t handle all of the data they’re carrying and are responsible for packet losses and delay, thus diminishing the overall user experience. This newly announced change will coexist with the carrier’s current congestion management efforts which mainly entail throttling users to 8Mbps speeds in certain scenarios.
Directly related to this new throttling strategy is the Stream More service that Cricket Wireless also announced on Sunday. The functionality will reduce the quality of streamed video content to 480p and will likely be enabled for all users by default. While customers will have the option to disable Stream More whenever they please, the carrier advises against it. If the quality of your streamed videos drops to 480p come early April, you’ll be able to turn off Stream More from the MyCricket app. On a more positive note, the Atlanta-based company recently confirmed it will launch Wi-Fi calling and VoLTE services over the course of this year.