• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 16, 2015

As of today, Sprint users who sign up for "unlimited" data plans can no longer count on being able to stream movies, download music or send photos at will.

Instead, Sprint plans to manage congestion on its network by slowing down some people who consume more than 23 GB per billing cycle. The new throttling policy, which only applies when the network is congested, takes effect today for new subscribers. The policy will apply to existing subscribers when they upgrade their handsets.

John Saw, chief technology officer at Sprint, says in a blog post that the new practice aims "to protect against a small minority of unlimited customers who use high volumes of data and unreasonably take-up network resources during times when the network is constrained."

Sprint also is hiking the price of "unlimited" data plans to $70 a month, up from $60.

Sprint rivals T-Mobile and AT&T impose similar so-called "soft caps" on their unlimited data customers. T-Mobile said in June that subscribers who consume more than 21 GB in a billing cycle would be subject to slowdowns during times of congestion.

AT&T also reserves the right to manage congestion by throttling subscribers consume more than 22 GB of data per month. For AT&T subscribers that policy, which took effect last month, marks a significant improvement over the company's prior practice of throttling people who consumed more than 5 GB of data per month.

Verizon still offers unlimited data to people who subscribed to those plans before 2011, but is raising the price of that service by $20 a month.

Sprint's Saw writes that 23 GB of data is "far more" than most customers use in a month. "With 23GB of data you can send 6,000 emails with attachments, and view 1,500 web pages, and post 600 photos, and stream 60 hours of music, and stream 50 hours of video each and every month," he writes.

As of today, regulators haven't commented on Sprint's new plan. In the past, however, officials at both the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission have criticized mobile carriers for imposing caps on subscribers who pay for unlimited data.

“AT&T promised its customers ‘unlimited’ data, and in many instances, it has failed to deliver on that promise,” Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said in a statement last year, when the agency sued AT&T over its mobile data caps. “The issue here is simple: ‘unlimited’ means unlimited.”