Competition is what helps even more. The Sprint/T-Mobile merger should never have been allowed to happen. Mergers are never good for consumers, despite Chicago School propaganda that says otherwise.

Preventing mergers is regulation.

Chicago School?

> I'm 100% convinced that all telecoms are bastards.

The one I use literally just increases how much data is included with my plan, rather than increasing the price. I quite like it. (I don't think it's available outside of austria though)

https://www.hot.at/

This is one of the reasons I get annoyed at services that require a phone number for an account.

As such, I am never going to switch to Telegram or Signal unless you let me have an account that's not tied to a number. I've lost shit in the past because of this, a phone number is only a temporary identifier.

Signal supports usernames now.

It is still tied to your phone number though.

Went to Signal to sign up and it is requesting a phone number. How do I give it a username instead?

Not for nothin, but it is not an uncommon opinion that regulation is the root cause :

Regulation = high barrier to entry in industry = monopoly/oligopoly = all telecoms are bastards.

Isn't there kind of a fundamental issue here that spectrum is a limited resource? How many competitors can there be when youre initial investment has to be a massive amount for a usable section of it

Regulation isn’t the root cause, and it usually never is the root cause as regulations are always made in reaction to, not usually proactively.

You don't have to limit that first statement to telecoms.