Cellphone plans are getting cheaper -- thanks, President Obama! (and T-Mobile)

[Commentary] Next time you go shopping for a new cellphone plan, you're likely to find that the options are a lot better than they were a couple of years ago. Prices are lower. You don't have to sign up for one of those annoying two-year contracts. You'll probably get unlimited phone calls and text messages as a standard feature — and a lot more data than before. If that happens to you, you should thank the Obama Administration — specifically, the antitrust watchdogs at the Department of Justice.

Many of the positive developments of the past four years have been driven by T-Mobile, which until recently was the smallest of the nation's four national wireless providers. Back in 2011, AT&T was on the verge of gobbling up T-Mobile, which would have turned the industry's Big Four into the Big Three and eliminated the industry's most unpredictable company. "Even prior to the merger, T-Mobile was known as being this maverick competitor," says Brent Skorup, a researcher at the Mercatus Center. If the merger had gone through, the industry's maverick would have disappeared. But then the Obama Administration intervened to block the merger. With a merger off the table, T-Mobile decided to become a thorn in the side of its larger rivals, cutting prices and offering more attractive service plans. The result, says Mark Cooper, a researcher at the Consumer Federation of America, has been an "outbreak of competition" that's resulted in tens of billions of dollars in consumer savings.