Boost Allows Disable of Video Throttling

For those of you who didn’t actually read all of the Terms and Conditions for Sprint’s prepaid company Boost Mobile, it might be a bit of a shock to hear that Boost Mobile formerly included a notice that all video streaming, regardless of the amount of data used, was throttled to 3G speeds of around 600 Kbps. This little clause has been around for a while, but never really got all that much fanfare. And now, fortunately, it’s gone. Kind of. Added to the list of things that Sprint is finally coming clean about, Boost Mobile announced recently that customers can now choose to turn off this throttling of video for better quality. They even included a mildly manipulative graphic showing estimates of how fast your 10GB of data would be used with each speed. BoostMobileEnhancedstream It’s worth noting that most streaming services aren’t going to be using 5 GB per hour, which is what the graphic is suggesting. Of course, that isn’t to say that the faster streaming speeds won’t eat through your data faster; just that hte graphic is misleading. Karma’s Blog has a great article that talks about how much data popular streaming apps like YouTube, Netflix and various music streaming sites uses, and most of them actually are tailored to how fast your speeds are. So, while streaming can take up your data quickly, it’s nowhere near what Boost is implying. Unless, of course, you’re tethering but that’s a whole different story. To give it a try yourself, select EnhancedStream from the My Account page on Boost’s website in order to turn off the 3G limitations to streaming. Boost does include a notice that 4G streaming will use up more data faster. SmartStream, by contrast, keeps things at 3G speeds, pretty much exactly how they are right now. For more information, visit Boost Mobile’s website.]]>

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1 Comment

  1. Jim Worrall on September 5, 2015 at 10:12 pm

    This is Boosts biggest secret. http://www.boostmobile.com/enhancedstream/ redirects to the homepage and customer service denies they ever offered it