e wireless communications industry, especially during the boom years of the late 1990s, led to a string of events in which both the regulators and the regulated lost sight of the business imperatives and man- aged to find financial hardship amidst unprecedented success. Major wireless carriers around the world, mostly affiliated with major wireline carriers, bid amazing sums at auctions for new wireless licenses. This was good for taxpayers but left the auction winners saddled with unsustainable debt. How did it come to this? Wireless [1] telecommunications in the 1970s was a niche market. Two- way mobile voice communications was primarily limited to private systems, generally known as land mobile radio. Motorola had the lion's share of the equipment market, selling to public safety agencies such as police and fire, as well as utilities, taxicab fleets, and other industries that needed instant commu- nications with a mobile workforce. Companies that needed systems generally had to buy everything themselves. They might put up a tower for the base sta- tion or rent space on a tower or other high point. The base station might be a The Great Telecom Meltdown half-duplex [2] dispatch radio or a full-duplex repeater that enabled all units within its service range to talk among each other. Demand for these systems grew continuously in the years after World War II, and the FCC routinely added new frequency bands for them, but frequencies were still usually tight in major markets. Then there were the radio common carriers (RCCs). These companies generally operated one-way paging systems for the public. They rented out "beepers," which would respond, when signaled by a high-powered radio trans- mitter, when a person dialed the beeper's assigned telephone number. The RCCs' customer base included doctors, volunteer firefighters, and others who needed to be reached at all hours. Beepers were generally one-way devices, some- times capable of displaying a return phone number and occasionally able to broadcast a brief voice mess