There's definitely a "side of the pond" aspect to this - US operators pay for media companies, but they likely do so to raise their margins, and I presume they're borrowing the funds from institutional investors to do this, rather than bootstrapping their acquisitions with profits.

In Europe you'll likely see far lower per-user pricing due to competition. You'll typically have 3 or 4 operators with physical networks, and a number of virtual operators providing white labelled service over the underlying networks.

A standard target ARPU (average revenue per user) would probably be around 15 GBP per user per month. You'll likely get to that via contract users who you try to get on 22 GBP per month or thereabouts, and pay as you go users whose ARPU is far lower (maybe 8 or 10?)

Compared with the US, consumer prices paid are incredibly cheap - expect unlimited calls and SMS, and many gigabytes of data. If you shop around you'll get even cheaper still. In the UK you'd be able to get unlimited 4G or 5G data for 25 GBP per month.

Clearly the US has a much larger geography to cover, but there's definitely more competition leading to downward price pressure in Europe, in my view.

More than allowed - in the EU at least, telecoms (wireline at least) is heavily regulated, and monopoly infrastructure providers (i.e. wire owners) are required to provide wholesale services and operate on those services for their own retail arms. Mobile operators have slightly less regulation in the way of competitition but there are similar requirements for vMNOS etc. So yeah, overall margins tend to be smaller and there's healthier competition overall, but telecoms is still flush with cash in general.