ery compact" was relative: A small VCDX still occupied multiple bays. Nortel had the well- established DMS-100, which it repackaged for CLECs (same hardware, differ- ent bundling of software) as the DMS-500. Both of these had entry-level prices over a million dollars. So did the obvious third choice, the Siemens EWSD, which had also been homologated into the RBOCs' networks. There were not many other choices, because the telephone switching business had become more concentrated over the preceding decade. DSC Communications, founded as Digital Switch Corp. and purchased by French giant Alcatel in 1998, had been selling its DEX tandem switches to long distance carriers; these had limited end-office capabilities but were used by some CLECs. Venture capital abhors a vacuum, and the coincidence of the Telecom Act and the boom led to a burst of activity. A number of companies jumped in to address various niche markets that had sprung up, largely among CLECs. These new switches were not, for the most part, clones of old Lucent designs; they reflected both the far greater capacities of modern hardware, especially fast semi- conductors, and newer software architectures. The Great Telecom Meltdown Enter the Softswitch A new word entered the vocabulary during the boom, following the Telecom Act, that described the predominant new idea in telephone switching. In addi- tion to the sudden appearance of CLECs on the scene, the development of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP or Voice over IP) was certainly an impetus for some new development, especially the so-called "softswitch" concept. But that term was never well defined. The "softswitch" began as part of Voice over IP architecture: With an IP network, possibly even the whole Internet, function- ing as the core matrix of the switch, call control itself could be handled by a processor somewhere on the network. This became known as a call agent, or softswitch. Initially it was stand-alone software that managed distributed media gateways that put voice onto a network-usually 