nate and receive local, intrastate, interstate, and international calls. The first analog cellular service began in 1983, but digital wireless ser- vices did not become widely available until 1995. Since that time, wireless service has grown tremendously, while the price of using it has plunged. As figure 3-8 showed, the gap between fixed-wire access lines and wireless sub- scribers is narrowing rapidly. The biggest surprise in figure 3-8 was not the steep continuing rise of wireless subscriptions, but the sudden decrease in traditional telephone access lines beginning in 2001. For the first time in modern history, the number of traditional lines declined. The incumbent telephone companies' end-user access lines shrank from 177.6 million at the end of 2000 to 151.8 million at the end of 2003, a decrease of approximately 26 million lines. By contrast, the new competitive carriers (CLECs) reported an increase of less than 15 million lines in the same period. 4 Nearly 80 percent of the incumbents' decline was in residential lines and small business lines, and a similar percentage of the CLEC increase was also concentrated in this residential and small business category.5 One might attribute the sudden decline in wire-based lines to the 2000-01 economic slowdown, except that telephone sub- scriptions did not plummet during the last U.S. recession, in 1990-91. Nor did lines decline in earlier post-World War II recessions. One of the new culprits is the decline in second lines due to the growth in broadband. Another is likely the development of wireless as an alternative to conven- tional telephony. The Development of Wireless Services Before 1983 few people considered acquiring a mobile telephone because of its high cost and the low quality of service arising from its inefficient use of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, a new cellular technology in the 1970s allowed much more efficient use of the spectrum because the same frequencies could be used simultaneously in different "cells" within a given metropolitan ar