Mobile service providers actually believe, and many would argue results support, the notion that the market is robustly competitive, despite unequal market share. Application providers, for their part, also mostly see the "pipe" providers to be relatively unimportant, or at best secondary gatekeepers in the application space, where most of the possibility of growth now exists.
Device manufacturers likely would be less inclined to dismiss the role of the mobile service providers, of course. Still, after Apple's successful challenge to operator control, virtually all mobile device manufacturers, and especially the leading smartphone providers, have significantly more leverage.
In fact, the chief concern executives have is that value increasingly is driven by applications and devices within the mobile business, not intrinsic qualities of the networks or the retail packaging policies the networks can devise.
Some parts of the policy community apparently have a different view, namely that there is too little competition on the mobile operator side of the business. Apparently the existence of four major national providers and many regional providers, plus scores to hundreds of resellers, is not evidence of competition. Of course, many will point to the roughly 65 percent market share held by just two providers as evidence that competition is lacking.
But national communications networks are quite capital intensive. So costly, most would agree, that only a limited number of providers can prosper. What the precise number of viable competitors is, is a matter of debate. Many observers would argue that four national providers is not viable, longer term, and that a stable market would feature three big national wireless players.
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