A leak last week revealed that Sprint was planning to start putting bandwidth caps on a previously-unlimited service, with 5GB ceilings coming to smartphone tethering plans. Granted, that’s still a lot of data to burn through, but we started to wonder if this was the writing on the wall that would end up leading to the carrier dropping unlimited data altogether and going the way of the other big networks. For now, it seems, unlimited data is here to stay, according to comments made by CTO Stephen Bye today.

Bye recognized the expenses associated with unlimited data, but argued that some of that was offset by reduced overhead from having to bill accounts and field support calls related to tiered plans. While he made it clear that Sprint is committed to giving its users what they want, and it’s clear to the carrier that they want unlimited data, he stopped short of making any promises for the long term. As a result, we’ll be keeping a close eye out for further developments along the line of this hotspot capping. The state of unlimited data may be a delicately-stacked house of cards over at Sprint, but that house will be standing for at least another day.

Source: CNET