Europe has 27 different markets, to which we must add the United Kingdom. With between three and four companies each, there are around 101 operators with a network or spectrum that compete for just over 500 million inhabitants, according to market sources (and not counting virtual operators).
In total, there are 39 operators on the continent with more than 500,000 mobile customers, according to the ETNO report, the State of Digital Communications 2021. Among them there are some purely private, such as Telefónica or Vodafone, with others in which their shareholders share ownership with the State, such as Orange or Telecom Italia.
In the United States, the number of companies is similar to that of each European country, with three major players with fixed and mobile services (AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile), for a market of 320 million inhabitants. As a curiosity, T-Mobile is owned by the European Deutsche Telekom and became the third operator in the market after the purchase of Sprint (owned by the Japanese SoftBank) in 2018. None of the American companies have public capital.
In China, the number is similar to that of the United States, with three operators, but in this case they are state-owned. China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom share a market of 1.4 billion inhabitants. China Mobile alone has more than 850 million customers and the third operator has 250 million, half of the European population.
These figures mean that an operator in Europe covers 5 million citizens, in the United States 107 million and in China about 467 million, which suggests that the size of European companies will almost inevitably be much smaller than that of its competitors.