<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color: #000000'>There were obviously many facets, but I think one of the turns was due to DWDM. You no longer needed a pair for every circuit. That then contributed to the glut of strands.<br><br><div><span name="x"></span><br><br>-----<br>Mike Hammett<br>Intelligent Computing Solutions<br>http://www.ics-il.com<br><br>Midwest-IX<br>http://www.midwest-ix.com<span name="x"></span><br></div><br><hr id="zwchr"><div style="color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><b>From: </b>"Dave Taht" <dave.taht@gmail.com><br><b>To: </b>"Internet-history" <internet-history@elists.isoc.org>, "Network Neutrality is back! Let´s make the technical aspects heard this time!" <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net>, "NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>, "bloat" <bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net><br><b>Sent: </b>Sunday, November 12, 2023 9:48:46 AM<br><b>Subject: </b>The rise and fall of the 90's telecom bubble<br><br>Aside from me pinning the start of the bubble closer to 1992 when<br>commercial activity was allowed, and M&A for ISPs at insane valuations<br>per subscriber by 1995 (I had co-founded an ISP in 93, but try as I<br>might I cannot remember if it peaked at 50 or 60x1 by 1996 (?) and<br>crashed by 97 (?)), this was a whacking good read, seems accurate, and<br>moves to comparing it across that to the present day AI bubble.<br><br>https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/lessons-from-history-the-rise-and<br><br>In the end we sold (my ISP, founded 93) icanect for 3 cents on the<br>dollar in 99, and I lost my shirt (not for the first time) on it, only<br>to move into embedded Linux (Montavista) after the enormous pop<br>redhat's IPO had had in 99. The company I was part of slightly prior<br>(Mediaplex) went public December 12, 1999 and cracked 100/share, only<br>to crash by march, 2000 to half the IPO price (around $7 as I recall),<br>wiping out everyone that had not vested yet. I lost my shirt again on<br>that and Montavista too and decided I would avoid VCs henceforth.<br><br>I am always interested in anecdotal reports of personal events in this<br>increasingly murky past, and in trying to fact check the above link.<br><br>So much fiber got laid by 2000 that it is often claimed that it was at<br>least a decade before it was used up, (the article says only 2.7% was<br>in use by 2002) and I have always wondered how much dark, broken,<br>inaccessible fiber remains that nobody knows where it even is anymore<br>due to many lost databases. I hear horror stories...<br><br>The article also focuses solely on the us sector, and I am wondering<br>what it looked like worldwide.<br><br>I believed in the 90s we were seeing major productivity gains. The<br>present expansion of the internet in my mind should not be much<br>associated with "productivity gains", as, imho, reducing the general<br>population to two thumbs and a 4 inch screen strikes me as an enormous<br>step backwards.<br><br>(I have a bad habit of cross posting my mails to where older denizens<br>of the internet reside, sorry! If you end up posting to one of my<br>lists I will add a sender allows filter for you)<br>-- <br>:( My old R&D campus is up for sale: https://tinyurl.com/yurtlab<br>Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos<br></div><br></div></body></html>