How come our mobile phone industry is so behind?

In China:

By any standard you can think of -- coverage, price, ubiquity -- China's cellphone practices beat ours. You can use them in elevators, subways and parking garages. They work in Tibet, at the Great Wall, in remotest rural China, which is more than you can say for Ontario cottage country. Patients, doctors, nurses and visitors use them in hospitals, too, with no apparent ill effects.

SIM Cards:

A subscriber identity module (SIM) is a smartcard securely storing the key identifying a mobile subscriber. The card also contains storage space for text messages and a phone book. By using a SIM card, a subscriber can easily change the phone itself without losing his or her phone book and, more importantly, without having to change her phone number.

Since the SIM card slot is standardized (by the GSM11.11 standard), a subscriber can change carriers and use his current phone with a new provider's SIM card. However, this is difficult in the United States; almost all U.S. GSM providers SIM-lock phones that they sell—i.e., electronically lock their phones so that they can only be used with the provider's own SIM cards.

And as hard as it is in the US it's worse in Canada.