There are several statements here which are at best misleading, at worst inaccurate.

In spite of AT&T’s self-serving propaganda, in most markets, your choice is between AT&T and Verizon, plus possibly Sprint and/or T-Mobile. And in fact the wireless industry seems to be consolidating rather than the opposite. Smaller carriers like Alltel and now T-Mobile are being gobbled up by the bigger players (and there have been rumors recently of Verizon trying to acquire Sprint).
Verizon itself is the product of the merger between Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, Cellular One, and GTE. AT&T is the end result of SBC’s acquisitions of PacBell, Ameritech, and (the “old”) AT&T.

The Verizon iPhone sales have been underwhelming (at least thus far), based on everything I’ve read. And Verizon’s data service doesn’t seem to be any faster than AT&T’s — if anything, people I’ve talked to seem to have had the opposite experience.

And the negative perceptions of AT&T are somewhat misleading.
What is now AT&T wireless used to be Cingular. Cingular (which was jointly owned by SBC and BellSouth) acquired the wireless business of the “old” AT&T; the near-universal perception was that this was done to get access to AT&T’s subscriber base. (SBC subsequently acquired both the remainder of AT&T and BellSouth, at which point SBC rebranded itself as “AT&T” and Cingular became “AT&T wireless”.)
Cingular had always used GSM (like the rest of the world), but “AT&T wireless” as it was at the time was still using CDMA. Not wanting to maintain two infrastructures, Cingular “encouraged” former AT&T subscribers to move to GSM plans. Many consumers felt they were “slammed” into switching plans, and this I believe accounts for a large portion of the dissatisfaction with Cingular/AT&T. Ironically, many subscribers, at least in my area, nevertheless chose to remain with Cingular/AT&T — probably at least in part because Verizon’s plans are on average more expensive (around here it’s $20/month more).

In markets where it was available, T-Mobile provided a lower cost alternative to the “bigs” (but T-Mobile has consistently maintained high customer service ratings). T-Mobile USA’s acquisition is a loss for consumers.

I am getting less “conservative” and more libertarian with age … but there seems to be a tendency on the part of both conservatives and libertarians to defend corporate America no matter what it does — in spite of the fact that (as another mises.org post today testifies) big corporations are frequently interested in being anti-competetive. I am bothered by these knee-jerk reactions.
And I do understand that Sprint’s actions may be anti-competitive. My problem is that the article seems to take for granted that Sprint’s tactics are anti-competitive and AT&T’s are not.

Informative one