me in 2005. 2. AT&T Wireless was purchased by Cingular in October 2004, and Sprint and Nextel announced merger plans in December 2004. 3. The growth of wireless has sharply reduced payphone revenues. Between 1998-the year in which AT&T Wireless began to offer a nationwide calling plan-and 2002, pay- phone revenues declined by more than 50 percent. FCC, Telecommunication Industry Rev- enues 2002 (March 2004), table 2. 4. FCC, Local Competition: Status as of December 31, 2003, table 1. 5. Ibid., table 2. Notes to Pages 96-100 6. One would have expected these competitive services to remain with AT&T, but apparently AT&T did not pursue them aggressively because it did not believe that wireless services would be an important business. 7. Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, Public Law 103-66, Title VI. 8. For evidence of the counterproductive effect of regulation on wireless rates, see Philip M. Parker and Lars-Hendrik Roller, "Collusive Conduct in Duopolies: Multimarket Con- duct and Cross-Ownership in the Mobile Telephone Industry, Rand Journal of Economics 28 (Summer 1997): 304-22. 9. Denise Pappalardo and Jim Duffy, "Cingular, AT&T Wireless Face Hurdles," Net- work WorldFusion, February 23, 2004 (www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/0223attwireless. html [August 1, 2004]). 10. The FCC has also imposed number portability and E911 requirements on the carriers. 11. Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA), Semiannual Wireless Industry Survey. 12. Ibid. 13. The average cellular bill declined from $96.83 a month in the second half of 1987 (the first date for which data are available) to $39.43 in the second half of 1998 and has risen steadily since then to $49.91 a month in the second half of December 2003 despite sharply declining rates. See CTIA, Semiannual Wireless Industry Survey. 14. FCC, Eighth Annual CMRS Competition Report (July 2003), table 9. 15. For details, see www1.sprintpcs.com/explore/ExploreHome.jsp. 16. In 2003 Verizon Wireless began to roll out a 300- to 500-kilobit per second service in major metro