I'll venture on the aggressive side and say they are even less than a commodity. Communication companies like these are inherently highly competitive. Each one

I'll venture on the aggressive side and say they are even less than a commodity. Communication companies like these are inherently highly competitive. Each one only cover some part of the world (for instance, SMS to USA and canada). When you have a big company operating in multiple continents, like Uber, you MUST have multiple service providers to cover all your customers (and it will also come with costs savings so you really have maximum incentive to diversify). Once you have diversified to 3+ providers, you mastered the abstraction good enough to plug them in and out. The next logical step is to take advantage of that to put providers in a same zone in competition with each other.