ele- phones were actually served by the NYNEX switch in Falmouth, but its fran- chise gave it equal standing in the cellular lottery. NYNEX saw fit to make a generous offer to absorb the tiny company! This did guarantee that NYNEX won Boston. But the adjacent license for Hillsborough County, New Hamp- shire (the state's most populous, bordering Massachusetts and including the cit- ies of Manchester and Nashua) was won in the lottery by Continental Telephone, which at that time served a few rural towns in the county. For sev- eral years, until NYNEX purchased the franchise, the Hillsborough County line marked the beginning of roaming for subscribers from both sides, as the two sys- tems were initially quite separate. And that was another problem with the original licenses. The metropoli- tan area licenses were allocated based on standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA; the term was later shortened to MSA) boundaries, creating 305 little markets. But then rural areas were allocated even more granularly, with hun- dreds of rural service areas (RSAs) allocated their own licenses. Sometimes an RSA was just one county; often it was a sparsely populated stretch between SMSAs. This created a patchwork quilt of licensees, each required to make its radio signals effectively stop at county lines. Needless to say this was not terribly efficient. The Top Cellular Networks Grew to Profitability As cellular telephony began to catch on, the licenses became more valuable. Thus the companies that owned the licenses-typically a web of subsidiaries of a larger corporation-became more valuable. These companies themselves came into play. Metromedia, for instance, had owned a major RCC that won the Losing by Winning: Wireless License Auctions A-side licenses in several cities, including Washington and Boston. It established a set of subsidiaries that shared the Cellular One trademark among themselves and with other A-side providers. In 1987, Metromedia sold its wireless holdings to Southwestern Bell (later called SBC Corp.), which