T-Mobile was once the fourth largest U.S. carrier among the four “majors.” In September 2012, the carrier appointed John Legere as CEO and things started looking up for the company. Legere was a brash, bombastic executive who wore his hair rock star long, preferred wearing a T-Mobile t-shirt to a suit, and insulted his rivals constantly. More importantly, he put his customers first and unlike most CEOs in the industry, he seemed to know about the phones his company was selling.
While I never met the man, I can say that he made covering T-Mobile fun and he was named the top wireless CEO for five consecutive years by Glassdoor. When it came to innovation, Legere came up with great promotions including T-Mobile Tuesdays, Music Freedom, Netflix on Us, and more. He made sure that T-Mobile was the first of the majors to break from offering subsidized phones and two-year contracts and whatever Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint offered, T-Mobile would do it better.
Eventually, T-Mobile became the nation’s second-largest carrier behind only Verizon, and Legere left after pulling off the $26 billion acquisition of Sprint that gave T-Mobile the 2.5GHz mid-band spectrum that has allowed it to arguably be the nation’s 5G leader. And now, in November of 2023, T-Mobile has done the incredible. Well, almost. It is now the largest prepaid carrier in the U.S. topping Verizon.
Based on their recently reported Q3 earnings reports, the number of prepaid customers at T-Mobile, 21,595,000, tops the number of prepaid subscribers reported by Verizon, 21,420,000. AT&T is third with 19,391,000 prepaid subscribers at the end of the third quarter.
What makes this even more amazing is that back in 2021, Verizon purchased TracFone Wireless from América Móvil which added 20 million prepaid users to Verizon’s total. But Verizon has been losing many of these 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 acquiring TracFone, Verizon has lost 2 million prepaid customers.
Verizon has traditionally focused on postpaid because that’s where the big bucks are. 556 Ventures analyst Bill Ho believes that some of the losses that Verizon has experienced in its prepaid business segment were the result of the carrier letting customers on its lowest-costing prepaid plans leave.
Meanwhile, the next goal that T-Mobile has is to take over the number one spot from Verizon in postpaid.
