> there is an almost universally held belief that such a failure exists in the telecom industry There is a widely acknowledged market failure in the telcom mar

> there is an almost universally held belief that such a failure exists in the telecom industry There is a widely acknowledged market failure in the telcom market but it doesn't here. Specifically, telcom is a naturally monopoly so we expect there to be one provider and for it to have monopolistic pricing power. Whereas a healthy market has many providers and better pricing (from the consumer's point of view). In this case there are zero providers because there isn't a high enough collective willingness to pay on the part of the would be consumers to cover the costs, much less any profit. That's not a market failure, at least as it is generally defined.