For months now, we’ve been hearing about how Straight Talk throttles users after a certain amount of data. We’ve never really known when they throttle. We’ve heard some readers say if they use more than 250MB in a day they get throttled, some say after 1GB, some say after 2GB and others after 5GB. So it appeared that it was at random. However on Monday, TracFone who is the company that owns and runs Straight Talk along with a few other MVNOs sat down with Fierce Wirelessto explain when they start to throttle their users.
Recently, Both TracFone and Walmart were part of a lawsuit in federal court in California. This suit alleges that both companies were falsely promoting Straight Talk service as offering unlimited data when the speeds are actually throttled. Which led to Tracfone acknowledging that it does throttle data speeds down to 2G or EDGE when subscribers hit the 2.5GB limit.
This is all part of a statement sent to Fierce Wireless from a TracFone spokeswoman. The Straight Talk 30-day $45 “unlimited” plans and $60 “unlimited international long” plans include 2.5GB of high-speed data. “After reaching that usage, data will continue at 2G speeds for the remainder of the 30-day cycle.” The spokeswoman continued “High-speed data is restored once a new 30-day service plan is added.”
So now that we know that Straight Talk does indeed throttle after 2.5GB, we can now recommend Straight Talk to some people and inform them that they do throttle to EDGE speeds after 2.5GB of usage. Before we had no idea when they throttled us. It’s nice to know however.
This statement from TracFone does put to rest the rumors that the company begins throttling at 1.5GB which we’ve heard from Net10 customers, another TracFone owned MVNO. It’s great that TracFone has clarified their throttling policy though.