wed the 2000 election caused an even more perfect storm. A brief era of free-running capital backed by a friendly regulatory climate turned into an era of nearly nonexistent capital, feisty and liti- gious incumbents, and hostile federal regulators and courts. Many small, pri- vately held CLECs eked out a living, changing course as necessary to avoid the storms, waiting for better days. But the optimism that had greeted the new sec- tor just a few years earlier seemed almost like a distant dream, fading deeper into the past. Endnotes Maryland PSC order 71155; see also Katsouros, M., and C. Gump, "Telecommunications in the State of Maryland: Regulation and Competition," Office of Information Technol- ogy, University of Maryland, 1997, nts.umd.edu/-mark/630loca2.html. Vogelsang, I., and G. Woroch, Local Telephone Service: A Complex Dance of Technology, Regulation and Competition. From Industry Studies, 2nd Ed., 1998, Duetsch, L., and M. E. Sharp, eds., http://www.elsa.berkeley.edu/~woroch/dance.pdf. This assumed the same carrier serving area design guidelines that ADSL was meant to support. Sometimes rendered extended enhanced link or some other combination that leads to EEL; it is also formally referred to as a UNE combination. EELs were also created to sup- port analog lines, with bundled channel banks; their prices, however, were very unattrac- tive in most states. There is no one universally accepted formal definition of virtual NXX, but it commonly refers to foreign exchange service in which the serving carrier has no physical customers in the remote exchange. ILECs usually provisioned FX service via the "long extension cord" method but on occasion did use a CLEC-like method in which a prefix code was rated to a physically distant exchange. This was done many years earlier, for instance, in the San Francisco area, where Pacific Bell put San Francisco-rated numbers in other exchanges that had a high demand for FX lines. XCOM's architecture took advantage of IN2 capabilities to direct calls to the DMS-500 or dir