Visualizing How Big AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile Have Become

We love graphs that make huge scale business deals easy to digest and understand. This chart is a great example, showing us a timeline of major telecommunications deals and mergers. As we follow the path of the telecom world through the timeline, we see that there was once a wealth of cellphone carrier options. Today, this isn’t the case. We’re down to three major cellphone carrier options. These are: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. We have a visualization of what exactly happened to all these companies that used to be household names.

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One example we can see is the fate of Mint Mobile. A lot of people recognize this name because Hollywood superstar Ryan Reynolds was their spokesperson. T-Mobile made a lucrative deal to acquire Mint in 2023 and luckily for the company, Ryan Reynolds agreed to remain a spokesperson.

Out of all the companies, AT&T is the most successful with the most subscribers. But there is a thing as too much success. Because the competition for telecommunication has shrunk over the past few decades, the US Justice Department has intervened and investigated multiple big deals that may have breached monopoly laws. This happened when AT&T had to abandon their planned merger with T-Mobile. With only two major players left in the market, they would have violated monopoly laws. T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint also came under fire, but was ultimately allowed to go through. Many of these mergers are worth millions and billions, so we think graphs like these showing the trajectory of a whole industry are fascinating!