T-Mobile tops Verizon to become the largest U.S. wireless provider in this segment of the industry،
TMobile was once the fourth largest US carrier among the four “majors”. In September 2012, the carrier named John Legere as CEO and things began to improve for the company. Legere was a brash, bombastic executive who wore his rock star hair long and preferred to wear a TMobile t-shirt to a suit, and constantly insulted his rivals. Most importantly, he put his customers first and unlike most CEOs in the industry, he seemed to know the phones his company sold.
Even though I’ve never met the
man, I can say that he made covering T-Mobile fun and was named the best wireless CEO for five years in a row by Glassdoor. When it comes to innovation, Legere has offered excellent promotions, including
TMobile Tuesdays, Music Freedom, Netflix on Us and more. He made sure that
TMobile was the first of the majors to give up offering subsidized phones and two-year contracts and whatever.
VerizonAT&T and Sprint offered,
TMobile I would do better.
Eventually,
TMobile became the nation’s second-largest carrier behind Verizon, and Legere left after completing the $26 billion acquisition of Sprint that gave
TMobile the 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum which has allowed it to arguably be the national leader in 5G. And now, in November 2023,
TMobile did the incredible. Well almost. It is now the largest prepaid carrier in the
United States.
Verizon.
T-Mobile is now the nation’s largest prepaid cell phone carrier
Based on their recently released third quarter earnings reports, the number of prepaid customers at TMobile21,595,000, exceeds the number of prepaid subscribers reported by Verizon21,420,000. AT&T is third with 19,391,000 prepaid subscribers at the end of the third quarter.
What makes this even more astonishing is that in 2021, Verizon purchased TracFone Wireless from América Móvil, which added 20 million prepaid users to its network. VerizonIt’s total. But Verizon has lost many of those customers since the deal closed. Verizon hasn’t added net new customers to its prepaid plans since the third quarter of 2022, when it added 39,000 net new customers. Since the acquisition of TracFone, Verizon lost 2 million prepaid customers.
Verizon has traditionally focused on postpaid because that’s where the big money is. Bill Ho, an analyst at 556 Ventures, believes that some of the losses Verizon experience in its prepaid business segment is the result of the operator letting go of customers on its cheapest prepaid plans.
Meanwhile, the next objective that TMobile is to take first place Verizon postpaid.
