And that's what we are doing. To be rooted in one spot will be, inevitably, to become rooted in the past. In an era in which the Soviet Union has fallen and capitalism is ascendant in Eastern Europe, it should be no surprise that competition is about to reach even our local telephone exchanges. Competitive access providers are increasingly providing interstate telephony service to businesses that were once the sole domain of local telephone companies. Cable companies are seeking authority to provide local telephone service, and a recent survey reports that a third of cable subscribers would be willing to subscribe to comparably-priced telephone services provided by their cable company.
New technologies offer the promise of competition.
Consider the growth of wireless services. The number of cellular subscribers in the United States is expected to double by 1998, while entrepreneurs are planning to ring the Earth with satellites that will bring telephone services to people everywhere on the planet. The auction of PCS spectrum that begins in December, as a result of this Administration's leadership, may well reshape the structure of the marketplace by introducing wireless telephony competitive with traditional telephone wires. Some believe that, by the end of the decade, wireless telephone service could offer service at prices broadly competitive for some customers with traditional, wire-line telephone companies. That change alone would bring additional competition into the local and log-distance telephone markets.