[NNagain] The rise and fall of the 90's telecom bubble

[Nathan Simington]

Hi Dave,

Re not seeing productivity gains, I'm very interested in seeing telecom
start to translate more into productivity, including nuts-and-bolts
manufacturing productivity.

(From a 30-year backward perspective, you could reasonably argue IMHO that
much of the ideology that "deindustrialization is good" was generated to
justify software companies' valuation multipliers. The Chinese don't seem
to agree that deindustrialization is good or that it's a bad idea to hold
production assets on-balance sheet. Meanwhile, it's been historically much
easier to make money in flaky, consumer-grade software than in reliable,
infrastructure-grade smart manufacturing/logistics -- even though it's
clear that the latter is the real prize, just as steel mills were a bigger
prize for the 18th-c UK than faster post-horses or cheaper India ink would
have been.)

I think a lazy, vague equation between "good 5G" and "Chinese-style smart
manufacturing" has had a lot of policy salience in the last 5 years. Would
love to spend some time thinking together about what a smart manufacturing
system would look like in terms of connectivity, latency,
compute availability, anything that occurs to you. I know a guy who does
devops for factories, and he has amazing stories -- might be good to make
that connection as well. Also, I think you had a catch-up with Adam from my
team about wireless ISPs/improved routers -- hope that went well!

Take care,
Nathan

On Sun, Nov 12, 2023 at 10:49 AM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>


-- 
Nathan Simington
cell: 305-793-6899
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