There's a hundred operators in Europe, whereas there's three or four in the US and China. This fits in Neelie Kroes' plan to drive consolidation among operators.
I don't know how it is in other countries, but here in Poland we used to have 3 mobile operators, each one with their own cell towers, right now we have 4, but two of them have been bought by international comapnies (tmobile and orange).
