Muhammad ran the General Post and Telecommunications Company, which owned the monopoly on satellite- and cell-phone services.

In conjunction with entertainment company WFX, they offered a cell-phone service that featured collectible merchandise and a membership card with access to backstage reports directly from Spears.

I had been trying to get hold of her for days, but cell-phone service has been cut, and Internet access, which is absurdly slow in the best of times in Iran, has been restricted to three unpredictable hours a day.

And the service is far less expensive than cell-phone service, costing as little as $10 per month.

So the Metropolitan Transit Authority has outfitted four Manhattan subway stations for cell-phone service.

But as spectrum grew incredibly valuable, this cozy system led to endless challenges and counterchallenges: the last big proceeding, in which the lawyers fought trench warfare over some $100 billion of free cell-phone licenses, delayed the start-up of cell-phone service in big cities by more than a decade.

According to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, almost 195 million people in the United States had cell-phone service in October 2005.