erconnection, network economic effects will lead customers to flock to the largest network. Once the market reaches its tipping point, the value of the network of the dominant player will SO far outstrip that of its competitors that the market collapses into a natural monopoly. Once tipped, the difficulties that new entrants face in generating sufficient volume to untip the market can cause the resulting monopoly to become locked in (Economides et al. 1996; Noam 1997; Shelanski 2007). The analysis is not quite SO simple, however. Because SO much of the litera- ture focuses on the potentially anticompetitive consequences of network economic effects, it is often overlooked that network economic effects also provide powerful incentives in favor of interconnection. For example, in a market with five equally sized players, any player that refused to interconnect would put itself at a tremen- dous competitive disadvantage (Katz and Shapiro 1985; Faulhaber 2005). As noted above, this conclusion is reflected in the FCC's current policy toward intercon- nection access in the wireless industry, in which it concluded that the presence of multiple similarly sized providers created sufficient incentive to ensure intercon- nection access even in the absence of regulation. As noted in Chapter 4, refusal to interconnect is less likely to harm competition in markets undergoing rapid growth, because the primary focus in such markets is the acquisition of new users. The only scenario in which equally sized players have an incentive not to interconnect is when two equally sized firms engage in a race for the market. Interestingly, though, this type of competition does not lead to the delays in technology adoption and supracompetitive returns associated with refusals to interconnect by dominant firms (Besen and Farrell 1994). It also has the virtue of promoting the rapid buildout of new network technologies. Indeed, this appears to be precisely the type of competition that ensued during the early competitive era of local telephone se