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Verizon completes Tracfone acquisition after FCC approval:
Verizon on Tuesday said it had completed its acquisition of prepaid mobile company Tracfone, just a day after the US Federal Communications Commission voted to approve the $6 billion deal. Verizon announced the acquisition in September, pending the regulatory approval that finally came this week.
[...] When the deal was announced, Verizon's CEO Hans Vestberg tweeted that the company was excited to "put the full support of Verizon behind this business." It's another big investment from the wireless carrier, following Verizon's spending $53 billion on radio airwaves this March.
[...] The FCC's approval came with a long list of "binding conditions to address potential harms and to ensure the transaction will be in the public interest," according to an FCC press release. Those conditions are largely centered on keeping Tracfone's products and services accessible and affordable for low-income consumers and ensuring Tracfone's existing customers don't get left behind in the transition.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by weilawei on Wednesday November 24 2021, @03:18PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @03:51PM (1 child)
Indeed. I wonder how long it will be before those Tracfone customers who currently use the AT&T network will be forced to move to Verizon's instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @05:41PM
Probably as quickly as Verizon can move them to their own network. Why pay AT&T the inflated charges each charge their customers when they only have to pay the extremely low cost it actually requires to provide the service themselves.
This has been the standard phone company playbook since forever. Their internal costs for carrying voice traffic was fractional cents per minute, even back when they charged everyone 75 cents per minute to call from New York to Los Angeles. That's why phone service was so profitable and they could afford to pay for things like Bell Labs. Charging the customer 75 cents per minute for something that actually cost 1/10 cent per minute to transmit meant huge profits.
I had a tracfone very early on (circa 2004 or so). Their charges then were the equivalent of 25 cents per minute, and while the "minutes did not expire" one had to buy a refill card on a periodic basis (monthly or yearly depending on card) to "maintain" the minutes, So if one was a low usage user, one paid extra to not have one's minutes expire, and if one was a heavy talker, one paid a nice premium for the minutes one was using.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday November 24 2021, @06:42PM
I'm sure the FCC will deal with noncompliance with the same force and vigor with which they deal with phone companies receiving large amounts of public money to build infrastructure which is then never built. Never even started.
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