Mobile phone service in the US was already shitty and this is just going to make it worse, regardless of my personal issues with using my phone.

For the record, for those not in the US, AT&T and T-Mobile are the only two GSM providers. There wasn't really much competition between them before, since people in the US largely don't think about owning a phone outright, and they used different frequencies for their 3G signals, but this is going to absolutely kill any competition that did exist. There are really only two other mobile service providers at all: Sprint and Verizon.