1 This suggests that interstate minutes were being diverted in some manner after 1996, perhaps in the fashion alleged in the complaints lodged against WorldCom. It is difficult to confirm this diversion hypothesis directly through an analysis of the margin of interstate rates over switched access charges. As table 6-2 shows, however, the margin fell from 8 cents a minute in 1992 to 6 cents a minute in 1995, but it was still 6 cents a minute in 2001 despite a continuing decline in long-distance carrier concentration. 12 Surely the The Death of Distance and of the Long-Distance Carriers added competition from wireless should have reduced these margins in 1999-2001. Thus it is likely that the FCC calculation of interstate revenue per minute is biased upward somewhat owing to an underreporting of switched access minutes. To adjust the FCC series on revenues per minute, I assume conservatively that the diversion began in 1997, which accounts for 2 percent of revenues, and that it grew by 2 percent a year through 1999 and then remained steady in 2000 and 2001. The resulting effect on predicted minutes can be shown as the difference between the predicted and "predicted-adjusted" minutes (figure 6-1). Long-Distance Entry: Wireless and the Bell Companies The 1996 act did little to change the long-distance market at first. It barred the Bell companies from interstate (more precisely, interLATA) long- distance services in their own regions until they satisfied a laborious state- by-state "checklist" designed to show that they were cooperating in allow- ing entry into their local markets. 13 As mentioned earlier, no Bell company would succeed in gaining approval to offer such service until the end of 1999. By the fall of 2002, however, the Bell companies had obtained approval in states accounting for more than 80 percent of their access lines, and by the end of 2003, they were allowed to offer service in all of the lower forty-eight states plus the District of Columbia. Bell company entry was not the only major new source of