Lately there’s been a lot of speculation around Straight Talk and more importantly the AT&T side of this MVNO. As most of you know, Straight Talk operates on both AT&T and T-Mobile’s network. They give you the choice of which SIM you want to use. We reported a few months ago that AT&T SIMs were no longer available for sale at Straight Talk. Now in today’s blog post on the carrier’s site, Straight Talk clarifies that it’s not cutting off data when you reach 1.5GB of data usage.
“You may have heard rumors online that there is a hard cap of 1.5GB for data on Straight Talk. We want to clear this up for you right away: We are NOT cutting off data at 1.5GB on Straight Talk.”
Of Course, Straight Talk still doesn’t tell us when they throttle data speeds for their customers. We’ve seen posts that say after 150MB per day you get throttled along with other posts that say their monthly limit is 1-4GB. Then there’s also the extreme cases where Straight Talk has cancelled abusers accounts with no warnings. Those are probably the users using 30-50GB per month of data. So it looks like the data limit is somewhere between 1-5GB per month, but we don’t know for sure. It could be on a per-customer basis. Which is something that Sprint-owned Clearwire did in 2010, where they announced a network management system which allowed the carrier to selectively throttle data for heavy users.
For those of you using Straight Talk, you probably already know that they offer unlimited talk, and text along with “unlimited” data for $45 a month. The reason why unlimited data is in quotes is Straight Talk’s definition for unlimited data isn’t the same as everyone else’s. We’ll keep researching and seeing if we can find where the throttle limit is for Straight Talk.
Straight Talk is making it kinda hard for us to recommend them as a GSM carrier to get a Nexus 4 or any other unlocked phone to use on. At this point, you’d probably do better with Simple Mobile, Solavei, or even T-Mobile’s prepaid plans. For those of you using Straight Talk, how often do you get throttled? And after how much usage do you get throttled? Let us know in the comments down below.
Source: Fierce Wireless, Straight Talk blog