for mr. milch and mr. watts, verizon and at&t defended their text messaging price increases on the grounds that both companies make independent decisions in response to market conditions. neither of your company's has made any effort to undercut your competitors on christ's -- your competitors on price. why did neither at&t nor for rise and resist these per message price increases or at least raise your price increase less than the other one in order to undercut your competition? this is what we always do in a marketplace to try to gain market share. this is the way business is normally compete, especially when you offer identical services. why did you each go up by the same amount? why did you not go up less than your competitor and get more business? >> there are a number of factors to your question, but let me point al that there was not a coincidence in time in the price changes. while you constantly hear the suggestion that these occurred simultaneously is not the case. most importantly, in looking at

. >> mr. milch. >> good afternoon. it is a pleasure for me to appear before you on behalf of verizon. weaver brought here to discuss to -- brought here to discuss testing. your letter of last year concerned pricing problems in the pay as you go textile market, which involves a 1% of verizon customers received. let me respond directly to the underlying issue. verizon did not collude with its competitors on setting prices for text messages. i believe the evidence shows any suggestion like that to be baseless. the evidence confirms the u.s. wireless industry is competitive in all its aspects. that meager through this with more detail. the tiny nature of this market makes any suggestion of collusion impossible. customers in this category send or receive only 21 texts per month. the other 99% are covered by a package bundles. in contrast, text users in bundles average almost 1000 texts per month. because of this increased usage the overall price has dropped. in december 2006 the average price was 3 cents per message. since