Bringing a Phone to Tracfone

by sb
(Virginia)

I received the following question from someone with an Alcatel OneTouch phone with Straight Talk:

I like Tracfone better, I don't download any thing so I think I am wasting money. Can I bring my Alcatel Onetouch to Tracfone or is there something else I can do?

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My Answer:

Thanks for your question. If you purchased a Straight Talk Alcatel OneTouch, then, unfortunately, you cannot use it on Tracfone as they are programmed differently. You would have to buy Tracfone's version of the Alcatel phone to use it on their plan. This is annoying since they are run by the same company, but I don't think there's much you can do about it. From what I know, simply unlocking the phone doesn't help in this case.

Regards.

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Additional Info:

If you had brought your own unlocked phone and purchased a Straight Talk SIM card, then things would be different. In that case, you could take their SIM out and put in another SIM card and activate it on another plan such as PTel.

Bringing a CDMA phone to Tracfone

If you have a CDMA phone (either Sprint or perhaps Verizon), you can try to bring that phone over to Tracfone. You have to go to their BYOP page by going to the upper left of their web page, moving your mouse over the "Phones" menu and selecting "Bring Your Own Phone" from the drop-down menu.

Once you get started, you will have to enter the serial number of your phone, and they will check whether you can use the phone with their plans.

Test Case with CDMA Straight Talk Phone

I tried to enter the serial number of an old Straight Talk Samsung Galaxy Precedent into Tracfone's BYOP page form. The Precedent was a CDMA phone on the Sprint network. When I entered the MEID number, I got the following error message:



So this seems to confirm that you cannot bring a Straight Talk CDMA phone to Tracfone. For phones like the Alcatel one above, this is not an option anyway, as there is no BYOP option for GSM phones.

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