Tracfone, which to this point has been mobile-only, has introduced a home internet service in conjunction with Target and Verizon, which owns the company.
Tracfone Home Internet will be exclusively offered at Target stores and on the Target.com website. It will use Verizon’s 5G network and offer a three-year $60 per month price guarantee, a router for $69.99 via Target and Target.com, what the company describes as “easy self-setup” with 24/7 customer service, and no contracts, hidden fees or credit checks.
Tracfone is a registered trademark of Verizon Value Inc., which is a Verizon company. Verizon acquired the company in 2021.
The Tracfone website offers an extensive Q&A on the new service. It says that Tracfone Home Internet will deliver download speeds of 20 Mbps to 200 Mbps and upload of 3 Mbps to 15 Mbps. The Q&A says that customers in 4G LTE coverage zones can expect download speeds of 20 Mbps to 50 Mbps and upload speeds of 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps.
Before the release of this internet offering, Tracfone has had several issues with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in recent years:
- In July, 2024 the FCC announced a settlement with the company to resolve investigations into whether it failed to reasonably protect its customers’ information from unauthorized access in connection with three data breaches. The agreement carried a civil penalty of $16 million.
- In December, 2023, TracFone agreed to compliance measures and a $17,487,000 civil penalty in addition to $6,013,000 to resolve a 2020 Notice of Apparent Liability for other apparent Lifeline violations, according to the FCC.
- In April, 2022, TracFone agreed to pay $13.4 million in a settlement with the regulator and the U.S. Department of Justice for alleged violations of the FCC Lifeline program. The violations occurred before Verizon acquired TracFone. The settlement covers allegations that TracFone signed up more than 175,000 customers for the Lifeline program during the period from 2012 to 2015, and had poor oversight and monitoring of the program, both violations of the False Claims Act.
