ge number of acquisitions in the 1980s and eventually sold its entire cellular business to AT&T, which had been left without wireless operations by the 1984 divestiture. Subsequently, Vodafone, Europe's largest wireless carrier, purchased Air Touch, which had earlier combined the cellular operations of Pacific Telesis and US West. Vodafone and Verizon then formed a joint venture to create a national wire- less carrier. Sprint purchased a large number of licenses in the auctions and created a national carrier, Sprint PCS. SBC and Bell South combined their cellular operations to create a national carrier, Cingular. After several prior mergers created Voice Stream, it was acquired by Deutsche Telecom and is now marketed as T-Mobile. Nextel gradually expanded its network across the country by acquiring spectrum in noncellular spectrum bands to create a sixth national carrier. The number of national carriers was reduced to five by Cingular's purchase of AT&T Wireless in 2004 at a cost of $41 billion plus the assumption of AT&T Wireless's debt, and the number may decline further to four if Sprint's merger with Nextel is completed in 2005.9 The Rapid Growth of Wireless Telecommunications This evolution of wireless services occurred in an environment of little direct government regulation of rates or technology. The FCC controls the auctioning of spectrum and requires wireless carriers to interconnect with other carriers at rates based on the reciprocal compensation rates negotiated among local carriers in each state. Otherwise, wireless rates are free of regu- lation because the 1993 legislation authorizing auctions forbids it unless a carrier has market dominance. Nor has the U.S. government attempted to standardize wireless technology as the European Union has done. 10 As commercial wireless services developed, carriers were forced to deal with subscribers who "roamed" outside their own franchise areas. At first, each market had a limited number of wireless carriers, and they charged each other very high rates for ser