ce (May 2004), tables 13.1 and 13.2. 3. For a discussion of this early history, see Gerald W. Brock, The Telecommunications Industry: The Dynamics of Market Structure (Harvard University Press, 1981). 4. This was also true in the United Kingdom and Canada. See Crandall and Waverman, Who Pays for Universal Service? chap. 3. 5. The market capitalization plus long-term debt and other obligations for the Bell com- panies and GTE at the end of 1996 was $330 billion, of which I estimate that $41 billion reflected the value of their wireless assets. I use the value per subscriber of AirTouch as the basis for estimating the value of RBOC plus GTE wireless subscribers. These companies had 149.1 million switched subscriber access lines at the end of 1996. These data are from company reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and from WWW. finance.yahoo.com. At the end of 1996 the "reporting" local exchange companies had $296 billion in plant and 155 million switched access lines, or slightly less than $2,000 in book value of plant per line. See FCC, Statistics of Communications Common Carriers, 1996/97 (December 1997), table 2.7 and 2.10. 6. For example, Qwest announced the sale of its Directory (Yellow Pages) business for $7.05 billion in August 2002. See "Selling Old-Fashioned Telephone Books Helps Tele- coms," Dow Jones Business News, August 25, 2002. 7. The incumbents may have been inefficient, thereby providing entrants with some po- tential margin between rates on existing services and the efficient cost of providing them. 8. FCC, Telecommunications Industry Revenues, 2002 (March 2004), table 3; FCC, Trends in Telephone Service, table 7.1. 9. FCC, Statistics of Communications Common Carriers, annual editions. 10. These requirements are spelled out in the 1966 act, sec. 251. 11. Joan Marsh, AT&T, "UNE-P VS. 271 LD Entry: What's the Real Trade-Off for the RBOCs?" Ex Parte Submission to the FCC, WC Docket 01-338 (September 25, 2002). 12. The states were Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, 