T-Mobile completed its acquisition of Sprint Wednesday, officially reducing the number of major mobile carriers in the US from four to three.

To win approval of the deal, T-Mobile promised regulators not to raise prices and to expand rural coverage by building a 5G wireless network covering 97 percent of the US population within three years and 99 percent within six years. T-Mobile now must conduct that project amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Critics of the deal have long argued that it will be hard to hold T-Mobile to its promises. “You need a scorecard to keep track of all the promises T-Mobile has made to state and federal policymakers in order to get approval for its anticompetitive and anti-consumer merger,” says former Federal Communications Commission attorney Gigi Sohn. “Regulators do not have the resources to ensure that these promises are enforced, and when they try, powerful corporations will do everything they can to avoid keeping them.”

More at Wired.