g solely on wireless services. Such a pattern has already been established for Scandinavian countries, where wireless penetration is much greater than in the United States. Perhaps the recent decline in total U.S. access lines indicates the beginning of such a phe- nomenon in the United States. If so, is the competition from wireless now sufficient to permit deregulation of local access service? The only direct public evidence on recent subscription decisions by U.S. households comes from the Census Bureau's monthly Current Population Survey (CPS). Three times a year, in March, July, and November, the bureau asks each of 56,000 households if it currently subscribes to or has access to local telephone service. Over the past decade, the share of U.S. households with a telephone has remained remarkably stable at about 94 percent. 30 Even in a year of mild recession, 2001, the share did not decline. Could these two divergent trends be explained by the substitution of wireless for wireline access? The evidence has been unclear because the census questionnaire began to ask each respondent if it had only wireless or only wireline service only in November 2001. From the first survey's frag- The Rapid Growth of Wireless Telecommunications mentary results, it appears that only 1.2 percent of responding households had only wireless service. Because of design problems, the question was dropped from the CPS for a number of years. In February 2004, however, the question was included once again, and the estimated share of house- holds with only wireless service has now risen to 6 percent. 31 The CPS data confirm the results from private market research by com- panies such as J. D. Power and Associates, which collects data on household subscriptions to cellular service. In its 2003 survey, J. D. Power found that approximately 3 percent of U.S. households have a cellular telephone but no wireline service.3 In a recent survey of household preferences, Primetrica and Ernst and Young found that between 42 and 58 percent of U.S. hous