 a mantra from the era: "To be big you have to spend big" [4]. And big DLECs and ELECs: An Exercise in Oversupply spending was the rule, as all three DLECs ran huge "burn rates." But burn rates did not lead to customers. According to a Yankee Group report, as of mid-1999, Covad had 31,000 lines in service, versus 12,000 for Northpoint and 6,500 for Rhythms. As of the end of 2000, FCC reports showed that the total number of CLEC ADSL lines was only 162,255 (8.2% of the total), whereas CLEC non- ADSL high-speed lines totaled 212,918 (20% of the total); that latter number included T1 and fiber-optic services, as well as DSL technologies other than ADSL. Clearly, the ILECs were keeping the lion's share of the business, even as their competitors were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to compete with them and with each other. Having a three-way nationwide race for the competitive DSL market would be bad enough, but of course there were many other competitors. Although neither AT&T nor MCI aggressively marketed ADSL during the late 1990s, Sprint took an innovative approach that integrated voice and data. Called integrated optical network (ION), it used ATM technology in conjunc- tion with ADSL to deliver a single-rate nationwide telephone service, as well as Internet access. A number of regional and local DSL providers also joined in the fray. Nowhere was the competition as intense as in New England, where overexpan- sion reached tragicomic proportions. While Covad, Rhythms, and Northpoint were already setting up shop, several smaller operations began to compete and received venture capital that allowed them to "get big quick." And although many small, local CLEC DSL providers did, in fact, survive the shakeout and even achieve a degree of prosperity, those that valued expansion over profits met a sadder fate. Vitts Networks was a small DSL provider based in Portsmouth, N.H., which by 1998 had about a dozen collocations in that state's little seacoast region. Then it received an infusion of venture capital, which