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* [NNagain] The rise and fall of the 90's telecom bubble
@ 2023-11-12 15:48 Dave Taht
  2023-11-12 20:22 ` Nathan Simington
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Dave Taht @ 2023-11-12 15:48 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Internet-history,
	Network Neutrality is back! Let´s make the technical
	aspects heard this time!,
	NANOG, bloat

Aside from me pinning the start of the bubble closer to 1992 when
commercial activity was allowed, and M&A for ISPs at insane valuations
per subscriber by 1995 (I had co-founded an ISP in 93, but try as I
might I cannot remember if it peaked at 50 or 60x1 by 1996 (?) and
crashed by 97 (?)), this was a whacking good read, seems accurate, and
moves to comparing it across that to the present day AI bubble.

https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/lessons-from-history-the-rise-and

In the end we sold (my ISP, founded 93) icanect for 3 cents on the
dollar in 99, and I lost my shirt (not for the first time) on it, only
to move into embedded Linux (Montavista) after the enormous pop
redhat's IPO had had in 99. The company I was part of slightly prior
(Mediaplex) went public December 12, 1999 and cracked 100/share, only
to crash by march, 2000 to half the IPO price (around $7 as I recall),
wiping out everyone that had not vested yet. I lost my shirt again on
that and Montavista too and decided I would avoid VCs henceforth.

I am always interested in anecdotal reports of personal events in this
increasingly murky past, and in trying to fact check the above link.

So much fiber got laid by 2000 that it is often claimed that it was at
least a decade before it was used up, (the article says only 2.7% was
in use by 2002) and I have always wondered how much dark, broken,
inaccessible fiber remains that nobody knows where it even is anymore
due to many lost databases. I hear horror stories...

The article also focuses solely on the us sector, and I am wondering
what it looked like worldwide.

I believed in the 90s we were seeing major productivity gains. The
present expansion of the internet in my mind should not be much
associated with "productivity gains", as, imho, reducing the general
population to two thumbs and a 4 inch screen strikes me as an enormous
step backwards.

(I have a bad habit of cross posting my mails to where older denizens
of the internet reside, sorry! If you end up posting to one of my
lists I will add a sender allows filter for you)
-- 
:( My old R&D campus is up for sale: https://tinyurl.com/yurtlab
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: [NNagain] The rise and fall of the 90's telecom bubble
@ 2023-11-13 19:27 odlyzko
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: odlyzko @ 2023-11-13 19:27 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: nnagain

Dave Taht's question about all the redundant fiber that
was put down in the telecom bubble is a very interesting
one.  It would be nice if some folks on the list could
provide some solid information, even if only for one
large carrier.

My impression, from communications with various folks,
is that much of that fiber from around 2000 was never
lit.  The reason is that better fiber came on the market.
However, what was used (at least in some cases, again,
this is something I would love to get real data on) was
that some of the empty conduits that were put down then
were used to shoot the new generations of fiber through.
(It was quite common for carriers to put down 4 conduits,
and only pull fiber through one of them, leaving the
other 3 for later use.)

Concerning the Doug O'Laughlin post that Dave cites,
it is very good.  For more on the myth of "Internet
doubling every 100 days," my paper "Bubbles, gullibility,
and other challenges for economics, psychology, sociology,
and information sciences" published in First Monday in
Sept. 2010,

    https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3142/2603

But O'Laughlin is too hard on Global Crossing, for example,
when he says it "was essentially a fundraising scheme looking
for a problem."  Global Crossing had a real business plan,
it was the first transatlantic cable that was not built by
consortia of incumbent telcos, and it planned to take
advantage of the rising demand for transmission by offering
capacity to new players, who would otherwise be gouged by
incumbents.  (It did get into accounting shenanigans later
on, as competition arose, but that was later.)  What is
most interesting is that their business plan was based
on an assumption of demand about doubling each year (which
is what was taking place), not doubling every 100 days.
(This I learned when I was consulted on some of the
litigation after the telecom crash, but by now the
information is publicly available.)  What killed them
is that their assumption that it would be difficult for
others to get the (special undersea) fiber, the cable-laying
ships, the permits, ..., turned out to be wrong, and so
a slew of competitors, inspired by the myth of astronomical
growth rates, came on the scene.  (Global Crossing's expansion
into terrestrial fiber networks was also a major contributor.)

One of the astounding observations is that while Global
Crossing was assuming 100% annual growth rate in traffic,
the industry as a whole (as well as the press, the FCC,
and so on) were talking of 1,000% growth rates.  And the
only observer that I was able to find who noted this in
print was George Gilder, who drew the wrong conclusion
from this!  (Details are in the paper cited above.)

Andrew

P.S.  Some interesting materials from telecom bubble era
are available at

     https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/isources/index.html



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2023-11-16 21:52 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2023-11-12 15:48 [NNagain] The rise and fall of the 90's telecom bubble Dave Taht
2023-11-12 20:22 ` Nathan Simington
2023-11-13 11:28   ` Dave Taht
2023-11-13 13:54   ` Livingood, Jason
2023-11-13 14:15     ` Sebastian Moeller
2023-11-13 21:08       ` Dick Roy
2023-11-14 12:06         ` Sebastian Moeller
2023-11-14 12:41           ` Dave Taht
2023-11-16 11:01           ` Sebastian Moeller
2023-11-16 17:02             ` Dick Roy
2023-11-16 17:20               ` Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond
2023-11-16 17:40                 ` Dick Roy
2023-11-16 22:03                   ` Frantisek Borsik
2023-11-13  3:46 ` Joe Hamelin
2023-11-14 13:48 ` Mike Hammett
2023-11-13 19:27 odlyzko

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