- Verizon’s history in the wireless prepaid business is, in a word, dismal
- A year ago, David Kim joined the team that’s trying to transform the business
- So far, they’re showing signs of success, with expectations of prepaid revenue growth in the second half of 2025
David Kim, a.k.a. DK, started his career in wireless as a high schooler selling phones at a Radio Shack in Tucson, Arizona. This was at a time when there was no number portability, so buying a new phone meant customers had to change their phone number to switch to a new carrier.
Try selling that today.
Thankfully, it’s relatively easy (and should be a whole lot faster) these days to port phone numbers from one carrier to another. But Kim still values the lessons learned during those early days at Radio Shack.
Today, he’s the chief revenue officer for Verizon Value, Verizon’s prepaid division that includes eight distinct brands. Prior to taking his position about a year ago, he worked at T-Mobile, Sprint and Dish Network, where he sold Boost Mobile.
Clearly, he’s seen and done a lot. Why go to Verizon, a company that historically wasn’t a big player in prepaid?
“Why not? It's Verizon. For me, Verizon always was the carrier that was like the carrier,” he told Fierce.
Understood. That was reason No. 1. His No. 2 motive was the opportunity to lead a portfolio of brands in national retail and in partnership with retailers like Walmart. “It’s a tough ecosystem to win at, and the fact that Verizon had such a strong presence from a distribution standpoint was intriguing to me,” he admitted.
Verizon’s foray into prepaid looked rather dismal a year ago. It wasn’t until newly installed Verizon Value President Nancy Clark brought in a “rock star” leadership team (including Kim) that things started turning around. By the end of 2024, Verizon – for the first time since the TracFone acquisition – ended the year with positive net customer additions in prepaid, excluding the SafeLink brand.
It’s not clear if that trend will continue in Q1, typically the weakest quarter for Verizon. At an investor event last month, Verizon Consumer Group Chief Revenue Officer Frank Boulben warned that the company was seeing a higher level of competition from its rivals than usual, triggering its stock to fall more than 6%. Verizon reports Q1 2025 results on April 22.
Earlier this month, Verizon launched its $45/month Visible Pro+ plan with unlimited data and upgrades to its $35/month Visible+ plan. Those changes won’t affect Verizon’s Q1 2024 results, but obviously are designed to goose Q2 numbers.
For the full year 2025, the company expects total prepaid subscribers to increase and for prepaid revenue to grow in the second half of the year, according to Boulben.
Verizon changes up prepaid
How did they turn it around? Several things happened after Clark and her team took over, Kim said.
For starters, they persuaded Verizon’s top brass to approve the right resources from a people and technology standpoint. Then they conducted research into what was bugging customers most about prepaid.
Chief among the customer complaints: the practice of getting throttled or deprioritized on data, meaning their speeds would go down after they used a certain amount of data each month.
Verizon listened to that feedback and changed things up. For example, Total Wireless customers now get the same network experience as they would get with Verizon postpaid but on a prepaid platform, he said. According to the Total Wireless website, customers on its $50/month plan won’t experience data throttling or get deprioritized and they can access Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband service.
“That was a very unique thing that we did,” he said.
On the device side, they’re working with OEMs to get more affordable handset prices. While it’s unclear how tariffs are going to affect this missive, Kim said that having worked in the prepaid ecosystem for much of his career, he’s developed a passion around getting device pricing in line with what customers can afford, knowing that many of these customers are using their phones as their sole or primary means of connecting to the internet.
Total by Verizon gets rebrand
Verizon is in the process of opening hundreds of stores – 1,400 at last count – for its Total Wireless brand, which previously was known as Total by Verizon. Kim said their research revealed that more than 70% of customers thought Total by Verizon was a rate plan rather than an entirely different service, and that sparked the pivot to Total Wireless.
To be clear, when customers visit a Total Wireless store, they see it’s backed by Verizon’s network, but “we wanted the brand to stand on its own in these neighborhoods where we sell Total Wireless, and that's why we made the pivot,” he said.
“Total Wireless is what I like to call kind of our fighter brand,” he added. “It’s a brand that’s situated to compete against Cricket, Metro and Boost. That’s really the spirit behind that brand.”
Changing the brand collateral at stores is an ongoing process and has yet to reach all stores in the national retail channels, according to Jeff Moore, principal at Wave7 Research, who closely follows the prepaid space.
Moore has known Kim for years and remembers him as having been an “energetic force” behind Boost’s sales efforts back in the day. “Certainly, he was hired in early 2024 to energize Verizon's prepaid sales efforts.” The result? “He has had an impact.”
Kim declined to comment on the fate of Boost Mobile, which, now under Dish Network parent EchoStar, is positioning itself as a challenger to Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. Boost Mobile continues to struggle to gain customers, to the degree that investment analysts are sizing up the market for when EchoStar ends up selling its spectrum assets.
“I hope that they're able to achieve what they set out to achieve, but it's tough to say where they'll be in a year to two years … I wish them all the best,” he said.
Using AI for better in-store experiences
One thing he learned from his days at the old Radio Shack store was that “everything matters” when you’re standing 3 feet from your customer. He still enjoys visiting stores and makes a point of walking around cities like New York and popping into retail stores to listen to what the sales reps and customers are saying – both at Verizon and competitors’ stores.
“Buying a phone these days is like buying a car. It’s a long transaction. The more we can do to simplify and make things easy for customers to understand, but also learn new things that are coming out, especially with AI and all the interesting things happening there, we can certainly help customers better when we do those things right,” he said.
“What stuck with me my entire career is that 3 feet from the customer – that interaction is everything,” he concluded.