well, joining us this week on "the communicators" is jeff gardner who has a couple of titles. number one, he's chairman of a group called u.s. telecom, and he's also president and ceo of the windstream corporation. mr. gardner, first of all, tell us what u.s. telecom is and what you represent. >> guest: well, we represent the telephone companies in the united states of america from the very biggest -- seizen, at&t -- to some of the very smallest. and what we try to do is really get together as a group, put together ideas so that we can really take care of our consumers in a better way. >> host: so when you talk about the small telephone companies, how many are there out here in the united states now? >> guest: there's thousands of telephone companies in the u.s. still, and so there's been plenty of consolidation, but there's still a lot of very small telephone companies. we have from verizon to small companies that are co-ops even involved in united states telephone association today. so still many different business issues as a part of that. we all try to work together to really solve common issues. that's what the whole purpose of

us telecom is and who you represent. >> we represent the telephone companies in the united states from the biggest to the smaller. we try to get together as a group and put together ideas so we can take care of our consumers in a better way. >> when you talk about the small telephone companies how many are there in the united states now? >> there are thousands of telephone companies in the united states still. there's been plenty of consolidation but there are still many companies. from verizon and our co-ops in the association today. so still many different business issues as a part of that. we all try to work together to solve common issues. that's what the whole purpose of the association is. >> we want to get into some of those policy issues in just a minute but what is wind stream? >> wind stream is a wonderful company. i may be buy ased in that review. we are in the triple play if you will, voice brond band, we are rural. we have stretch from new mexico all the way to up state new york serving about 3 million customers. we're in some very rural markets. some in the state of texas the average access lines per square mile is 8. very different