It's been a long while, but this seems relevant and worth posting for the sake of awareness.
Context.It's been no secret that I've had contentious feelings towards America Movil and Tracfone Wireless over the past decade. However, since the great T-Mobile/Sprint merger and Sprint's prepaid division divestment to Dish (who now owns Boost and Ting) with the intention of "creating a new fourth national wireless carrier" (as US Cellular gives a "what about us" death stare) with the remaining bits of Sprint's network that hasn't already been cannibalized for T-Mobile shut down in less than a year - Verizon now has its eyes on purchasing Tracfone Wireless (and all its subsidiary brands) for $6.9 billion USD.
The MVNO industry is in rough shape these days. For all the beef I had with Slim on the terms of service policies and lousy customer support and sketchy Lifeline dealings, Tracfone's presence was still the 800lb gorilla in the room pushing lower wholesale pricing for everyone in the industry with around 21 million subscribers between the three MNOs, and they're one of the largest Lifeline providers in the country, in a country of over 340 million subscriber lines. (The second largest MVNO is Consumer Cellular at only 4 million.) Of those 21 million subscribers, only 13 million are on Verizon's network. Verizon has also historically balked at providing Lifeline services, had some of the highest cost mobile price plans and wholesale pricing, and has deliberately let their copper phone network deteriorate for years despite hundreds of thousands of people in their network area having no alternative.
There's talk of possible regulatory divesting the AT&T and T-Mo MVNO customers on Tracfone to approve the merger, but Verizon has also made it clear that they'll want to try and convert as many Tracfone customers over to their network with the buyout.
This isn't great, folks.
Remember, there is no regulatory requirement for network operators to provide any sort of third party access to their networks, let alone at any reasonable rate in this country. The MVNO industry literally exists solely based on a promise by the big three (at this point) to do so, and we all know how good AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon are at keeping their promises when record profits are on the line.
Also remember that when I first published the guide in these forums over nine years ago (wow), the common going rate for PAYGO MVNOs wasn't uncommon to charge 5-10¢/minute, SMS, and MB of data, and even the best going prices on sub-$35/month packages didn't provide anywhere near what they do today. Also remember what you used to get with postpaid service back then. I also warned about the potential gutting of the industry with the boutique pseudo-MVNO prepaid brand introductions by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. As of 2Q2020, none of the big three officially report wholesale customer numbers anymore. And outside of vague promises of roaming interoperability, VoLTE has also basically killed handset interoperability between carriers for everything but a handful of the most expensive flagships, too... and there's still a Verizon model divide even with that.
MVNO customers are a fraction of the subscribers in this country, and we only still have this option because of promises made by three behemoth corporations who've left a trail of multi-billion dollar promises strewn dead on the side of the road. Now, the only true major player exerting any leverage against the three is about to be bought out by one of them, which means that wholesale leverage disappears almost entirely for the one making the purchase, Verizon.
We need meaningful telecom reform and regulation in this country for the sake of the user, but I'm not holding my breath. In a way, this is a bit of a screed, yelling into the darkness knowing that it won't do any good. But, as MVNO customers, you should at least be aware. Ask yourself what happens when our roughly ten percent of the market might become one percent with even just one of the big three, and most of the subscribers in that ten percent are on these plans not by choice like yourselves, but out of financial necessity... like me?
May you go in peace. Be well, everyone.