o build facilities in parallel to the incumbent telephone companies and make money at it. The cable television (CATV) industry had long coexisted comfortably alongside the telephone companies. For many years the two industries avoided challenging each other directly, even though it was long a possibility. The FCC recognized this by prohibiting local telephone companies from owning cable companies in their service areas, except for outlying rural areas where the cost of two networks would be prohibitive. Telephone companies were allowed to lease facilities to cable companies but not actually sell the services; the two industries rarely even entered into that level of cooperation, but neither did they compete. In 1982, start-up Local Digital Distribution Corp. introduced two prod- ucts designed to foster competition with the LECs. Radio packet controller (RAPAC) was a point-to-multipoint radio system designed for the new 10.5-GHz band [10]. Cable packet controller (CAPAC) was a cable modem. To be sure, the public Internet was a decade away, SO the mass market was not there, but CAPAC could have been used for linking corporate sites, telecom- muting, competitive access to long-haul data networks, or various other pur- poses. But the product was a market failure. A corporate executive explained the Competitive Access Providers, the Costly Way to Local Competition problem succinctly: Cable companies were not in the carrier business, they were in the entertainment business [11]. RBOCs Took the Threat Seriously By 1985, the still-young RBOCs were aware of the potential threat from cable, even in the absence of overt acts by the cable industry. The ITU's Broadband ISDN program, best known as the source of ATM network technology, was begun, in part, as a response to that potential threat. The best defense being a good offense, the telephone industry set out to develop its own set of technolo- gies that could carry video to the home. B-ISDN was to be the telephone com- panies' own triple play: voice, data, and video all on