I don't like to see smaller carriers absorbed, but if US Cellular's coverage maps are to be believed, they have far better rural coverage than T-Mobile does in my area, so I personally benefit. I'd never have switched because I both use and need T-Mo's really good international features, but I'll get better service out in the woods than T-Mo provided to date.
Consolidation is never good for consumers, IMO.
For the most part I agree, but cellular networks are an example of competition leading to substantial inefficiency and a loss for everyone, in exchange for that competition. You have multiple carriers fighting over bandwidth and building entirely redundant cell towers to cover the same population centers, while in rural areas you might have one option that covers the places you need, but doesn't offer any of the features of other competitors.
Obviously if there was a single,
unregulated (and for-profit) cell carrier it would be a disaster, but a hypothetical world in which a single organization efficiently built cell towers and took advantage of all available cellular bandwidth, everyone would have faster service
and better coverage, with less dollars spent building redundant towers where they aren't necessary that could be put toward building them where they are or used to reduce overhead.
It's the same as why municipal internet providers can beat competing carriers--building a single high-quality (and highly regulated, public-good-intended) infrastructure in a town ends up being more efficient than three entirely separate sets of overlapping infrastructure all trying to serve the same customers.
It's the same reason we don't have a bunch of private road companies or a bunch of separate poles-and-wires electric distribution companies in each region--it would be monstrously inefficient to have competing, overlapping road systems, and photos of old cities showed what an absolute mess it was to have multiple companies with redundant electric wires, but that's functionally what we're doing with wireless spectrum.