diff --git a/NEWS.txt b/NEWS.txt
index e39d5cd148..69ab4fdad4 100644
--- a/NEWS.txt
+++ b/NEWS.txt
@@ -19,6 +19,8 @@ using the provided 'sstableupgrade' tool.
 
 New features
 ------------
+    - Speculative retry defaults to 99th percentile
+      (See blog post at http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/rapid-read-protection-in-cassandra-2-0-2)
     - Configurable metrics reporting
       (see conf/metrics-reporter-config-sample.yaml)
     - Compaction history and stats are now saved to system keyspace
diff --git a/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/config/CFMetaData.java b/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/config/CFMetaData.java
index 479dafc04e..d63ee01f9e 100644
--- a/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/config/CFMetaData.java
+++ b/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/config/CFMetaData.java
@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@ public final class CFMetaData
     public final static Class<? extends AbstractCompactionStrategy> DEFAULT_COMPACTION_STRATEGY_CLASS = SizeTieredCompactionStrategy.class;
     public final static Caching DEFAULT_CACHING_STRATEGY = Caching.KEYS_ONLY;
     public final static int DEFAULT_DEFAULT_TIME_TO_LIVE = 0;
-    public final static SpeculativeRetry DEFAULT_SPECULATIVE_RETRY = new SpeculativeRetry(SpeculativeRetry.RetryType.NONE, 0);
+    public final static SpeculativeRetry DEFAULT_SPECULATIVE_RETRY = new SpeculativeRetry(SpeculativeRetry.RetryType.PERCENTILE, 0.99);
     public final static int DEFAULT_INDEX_INTERVAL = 128;
     public final static boolean DEFAULT_POPULATE_IO_CACHE_ON_FLUSH = false;