I suspect some of you in the US don't understand the phone market as well as you should...
Some of us understand the phone market just fine (thanks for asking).
What you should understand is that in the interest of eliminating long distance charges & network roaming fees, a few select carriers have been allowed to acquire a vast number of assets.
What you should try to keep in mind is that the UK has about 96,000 square miles to cover whereas the USA has 3.8 million square miles to cover. That is 40x more coverage. If we had 3 or 4 different carriers for every 96,000 square miles then that would be over 100 different mobile service providers trying to make agreements and handle logistics with one another.
With every advantage (simplicity of coverage) comes a disadvantage. Having such large, powerful telecom companies means that competition is stifled and enforcing policies that benefit the consumers against the wishes of the companies often takes an act of Congress.
Make no mistake, Verizon and AT&T are massively powerful companies. Just the wireless division of Verizon communications has an annual gross revenue of 27 billion dollars a QUARTER. To put this in perspective, just the wireless division of Verizon makes 1.5x as much revenue as Apple, Inc. each year.
So its not that we don't understand the industry.... its that USAians are living with a different reality.
Vodafone is in what.... like 2 dozen countries? Well, Verizon Wireless is almost as large and they are only in one country.... and AT&T is almost as big as they are.