Sprint to offer shared data buckets for customers

One of the biggest complaints levied at wireless carriers is the inability to share smartphone data among family members or multiple devices. According to an internal memo from Sprint that's popped up on the web, the carrier is going to allow the sharing of "buckets" of data on plans with multiple devices, effective June 12.

From the memo:

4G Data Share Plans: SNAP enables activation of 4G and 4G/3G combined bucket data share plans. This enhancement allows accounts with multiple subscribers to share data usage across subscribers with common Share IDs.

As a result of this change, a data share plan could have separate 4G, 3G or 4G/3G buckets. In addition, rate plans can have a voice pooling ID with voice minutes and a data share ID with data allowances. SNAP will not show pooling options for team members to help guests setup polling share options for guests.

Sharing data allotments almost certainly means the end of unlimited data plans on Sprint, as that is not conducive to sharing. Most likely the plans will come with variable caps based on monthly fees, and these buckets of data are subject to sharing. Sprint has not commented on the shared data plans.

It is great to see this finally coming to market, and hopefully other carriers will soon follow suit. Customers should be able to use paid data plans as desired, and this is a good start.