The UK has a reasonably good market for fixed line consumer broadband and mobile phones, as most places within a town or city have at least 10 options for each.
The back-end is the market failure, however as the near-monopoly BT/Openreach are highly visible they generally only abuse their position by refusing to build capacity unless the Government pay for it, and by nixing competitors when they try to build capacity.
In the US, each region has a local monopoly on fixed-line - there is often exactly one supplier! Thus they price-gouge and can get away with almost anything.
Mobile phones in the USA are similar, but not quite as bad.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
