Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Verizon Buys Tracfone

While the Tracfone-related networks have been expanding their domination of prepaid services by acquisition, Verizon has been hovering over Tracfone with the aim to become the new King of Prepaid.  Escaping to one of the TracFone-related services operated by American Movil, was how many of us were able to cut the cost of our wireless below the likes of Verizon Wireless.  Many of us will end up back under the big red check mark now that Verizon has agreed to purchase the US prepaid operations of American Movil.

The first concern is if Verizon plans to raise our prepaid prices, or will they do what they can to continue the current low-price philosophy of the various Tracfone networks.  It's difficult to imagine that Verizon will continue the various agreements each prepaid service has with AT&T and T-Mobile. Also, we should expect some consolidation among those brands. Hopefully, the remaining prepaid carriers to rise up and offer more prepaid products at competitive prices. They won't need to lower prices, just provide us with an alternative to the new prepaid empire.

On the other side of the coin is the possibility that Verizon could actually lower the cost of all those newly-acquired prepaid products and keep the other guys from competing. Yes, that could help the average consumer, but large companies have been careful not to spit in the soup and ruin the taste for everyone.