KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The good news is that you can control your data usage. The bad news is you need to pay attention.
Data caps and different pricing tiers increasingly define cellphone plans. They reflect the industry's attempts to manage the fast-growing way people use their mobile gadgets to jet around the Internet.
Sprint Nextel Corp. stands alone among the major carriers with its unlimited and unfettered data plans. It says it has no plans to change. For now.
Some analysts still think the day may not be far off when Sprint will have to separate the data hogs from the data tasters with tiers of service.
A hint may lie in the Overland Park, Kan.-based company's recent announcement that in October it will slow down the speeds of its data-hungriest customers on its Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go brand. That followed a move by Verizon Wireless earlier in the month to impose caps.
"It's inevitable," said Timm Bechter, a telecommunications analyst at Waddell & Reed. "You have to pay for what you use in the end."
Sprint's unlimited plans do pose a seductive appeal. Today's customers, after all, are the same folks who were floored a few years ago when their teenager's texts or their spouse's phone calls busted over their plan limits and left them with a triple-digit bill.
Now families routinely pay upward of $100 a month to outfit the clan in iPhones, BlackBerrys and Androids. By the minute or by the kilobit, prices have only gotten cheaper. But this month's phone does more than last month's handset, which makes last year's model practically antique. And these things feed on wireless data.
Donna Jaegers, an industry analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co., said Sprint's all-you-can-snarf buffet is "the main thing they've got to distinguish themselves."
Ask people which carrier to sign up with, she says, and they'll first tell you to check who has the best coverage in the places you go. After that, though, Jaegers said, people start talking cost. And a big part of the cost equation goes to data caps, which is typically priced separately from text messaging and voice calls.
The danger for Sprint, she said, is that its bottomless cup could draw the thirstiest data drinkers. That could ultimately ratchet up Sprint's costs for maintaining a network. The company has already seen its rollout of 4G — its fourth and fastest generation of wireless broadband — stall because network partner Clearwire has been running short of cash.
Still, its 3G network has fared better than its competitors' during America's overnight adoption of the smartphone, partly because it has about half as many customers, and thus more excess capacity, compared to the industry leaders.
AT&T had the first superstar, data-needy device with the iPhone. AT&T also led the way with cell plans that sold data in buckets rather than from a limitless tap.
This month, industry leader Verizon Wireless followed suit by saying it would grandfather in existing customers with their unlimited data plans. But new customers now have to buy their data by signing up for what the company calls usage-based plans. (The move came months after Verizon added the iPhone to its stable. But by then it was but one of many Web-surfing smartphones flooding the market.)
Verizon says that it spends $6.5 billion a year on its network and that the people who task its capabilities the most will now be charged accordingly.
"We give you all the tools to keep track," said Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney. "You can change (data tiers) anytime."
Verizon noted, and other cell companies offer similar assessments, that 95 percent of customers fall into the sub-2-gigabytes-per-month category.
Still, with caps comes download anxiety. Consumer groups are claiming an industry bait-and-switch. First, market the power of having email, navigation, Twitter, Facebook, music, video, games in the palm of your hand. Then start charging by the gigabyte.
Carriers could also, such groups say, easily give better warning when customers near their text, talk and data limits to spare them overage charges.
"Now that people are hooked, they're finding it increasingly difficult to avoid hitting the caps," said Joe Ridout, a spokesman for Consumer Action. "It's only going to get worse because people are going to be using more data, not less."
First you had to figure out how many minutes you needed. Then texts. Now you need to get your head around your data.
Chances are you can relax. Unless you stream hours of music every day or watch video regularly on your phone, you can probably fit under your carrier's lowest data caps. In fact, you ought to think about whether you're paying for more data than you use.
Even if you sent or received 300 e-mails, passed along 10 photos, looked at 50 Web pages and posted to Twitter or Facebook 100 times every day, you'd likely fall below the 2-gigabyte data cap that defines the lowest tier of most smartphone plans.
It'll help, too, to understand your limits. T-Mobile calls some of its plans unlimited, but there's a catch. The first 2 gigabytes are fed to you as fast as your phone and the carrier's network can deliver them over either 3G or 4G technology.
Creep past that limit and T-Mobile will still feed you data, just at 2G speeds — meaning downloads might take four or five times as long. Or T-Mobile will let you buy, a month at a time, into the next tier.
"It's not that we want to overcharge. We want to optimize," said Jim Mills, the vice president and general manager of T-Mobile's Great Plains region. "We're trying to manage the capacity of the network."
The new pricing draws not just from demand for data but other changes in the industry. Users have been chatting through 4 percent fewer voice minutes on their cellphones a year for several years running. And while texting is highly profitable for the carriers — they charge you much more than it costs them — analysts think competition is going to bring down those prices.
"So for data, they just want to make sure the economic incentives are appropriate," said Rick Franklin, an industry analyst at Edward Jones & Co. "Without that, over time, the money won't be there to make sure the networks keep up with usage."
When AT&T introduced its pricing tiers, it spun the shift as "breaking free from the traditional 'one size fits all' pricing model and making the mobile Internet more affordable to a greater number of people."
That rationale could be seen as more than just corporate slant. Yet without tiers, or with very broad tiers, aren't heavy data users subsidized by the folks who don't do much beyond regular Google searches and email checking on their phones? For that matter, why not just meter data like water, gas or electricity, charging customers only for what they use?
For starters, there's a significant expense to have a robust network ready when you need it. At Sprint, the argument harkens back to the early days of home Internet service. Then customers were billed by the hour and came to find Web surfing an anxious endeavor.
"It's a much better fit (for customers) to use as much as they want," said Sprint spokeswoman Emmy Anderson, "rather than worrying, 'If I download this attachment to my email, is it going to cost me?' "
That fretfulness inevitably stifles usage and innovation, the carrier contends.
If Sprint draws data hogs to its network, Anderson said, so be it. The company has a large amount of wireless spectrum relative to its customer base. It is also undergoing hardware and software improvements to carry more data, she said.
Still, the company won't say it will never cap its data plans, or roll out pricing tiers.
"We'll continue to watch what happens in the wireless pricing world," Anderson said. "At this point, we have no plans on changing our unlimited plans. ... We want customers to know we're the only national carrier with unlimited data."
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