TracFone purchased by Verizon

I’ve used TracFone as my cell phone provider for more than a decade. They do not actually have a cell phone network: they purchase services from the big providers like AT&T and Verizon.. TracFone is inexpensive (at about $10/month) and it meets my limited needs for phone use. I almost never use mobile data, since I am almost always around WiFi. I only Text to coordinate. And if I want to gab on the phone, I do it from home, not on the road, using Skype.

I had no idea that TracFone was purchased by Verizon at the end of last year. To my knowledge, neither TracFone nor Verizon announced that to me in any way. But that plays a part in my story.

I’ve had a Samsung Galaxy S10+ phone for about 2 years. In the last month, I no longer could rely on the phone to send or receive texts from within my house: I had to go take a walk to do either. The phone had 1 or 2 bars, but was not registered on the network. Puzzling. Because the cell phone system is complex, it was not clear what caused the change. Was the SIM card dying? Was the phone antenna or radio electronics failing? Had the patterns of tower transmission changed? Had one of the cell phone providers suddenly decided to drop my priority, so that I was no longer connected to the network, even when I had 1 or 2 bars? Hard to know.

I bought another new S10+ and tried to get it to work by swapping the SIM card from the old phone to the new. I was pleased to find that I could send and receive texts with the new phone immediately. I was not that pleased to discover that I could not send or receive phone calls. How could the phone “know” its number and get on the network for one kind of traffic, but not the other? So I called TracFone support.

I was on the phone for well over an hour, talking with 5 different people. Many wanted me to either join Verizon or get a Verizon SIM card: it was not always clear if they were trying to create a new Verizon customer out of me, or just get met to switch away from the AT&T network.

The cheapest plan I can get with Verizon would be 5GB of data/month for $25/month. That is about 4.9GB of data more than I need, but it is a lot more than the $10/month that I had been paying to TracFone. Or thought that I had been paying. It seems that the last time TracFone billed me was in November of 2020, almost 2 years ago. So, you can see why I want to keep my TracFone service. Hard to beat the price.

In the end I was told that the old SIM card that worked fine in the old S10+ phone could not be used in the new S10+ phone, and that I needed to get a new [free] SIM card, and switch from the AT&T network to the Verizon network. No cost except for a 10 day waiting period (they are very busy sending out free SIM cards for some reason). In the interim I can just switch that old SIM card back into my old S10+, and it works just fine.

A lot of puzzles in the story. Why does the SIM card work fine in one S10+ but not in a newer S10+? Why did service go to heck about a month ago? And why is TracFone unable to detect that their attempts to collect from me have failed for almost 2 years?

Edit…

I just realized what is going on. Verizon purchased TracFone, which has customers on both the AT&T and Verizon networks. And Verizon does NOT want to be giving money to AT&T for cellular services that Verizon could provide itself. So it is pushing all TracFone customers over to the Verizon network (but not necessarily as Verizon customers). So the “problem” with the SIM card was that it was sending revenue to AT&T. There was no technical glitch, just a business glitch.