oor to open to a new era of multiple infrastructures. Demand-side forces, especially the power of consumers acting on the political balance in government, have produced a revolution in the three key infrastructure drivers of telecommunications: As noted, first and foremost is regulation, or rather deregulation. Liberalisation of the market allowed the power of incumbent operators to be restricted and the entry of new players, unleashing the following two factors. Competition of all kinds - in services and equipment, and significantly in infrastructure competition. New technology - whose introduction, up to deregulation, was entirely controlled by the incumbents. The United States' Modified Final Judgement in 1983 under Judge Harold Greene and the break-up of the dominant operator and equipment provider, AT&T, heralded the end of an era and a move globally to a new liberalisation of services. Limited infrastructure competition had begun in the United States before the MFJ ruling using bypass technology for an alternative infrastructure for long distance - the microwave-towers of Microwave Communications Incorporated (MCI) from the mid-1970s, funded by the junk bond market. Hence the 1980s opened telecommunications markets to competing service providers and, to a limited extent, competition in the local loop though unbundling and alternative infrastructures. In some US cities an alternative fibre network infrastructure was built in the 1980s in deregulated local markets - one of the first being Nebraska. 16 However, the promises of the US CLECs (competing local exchange carriers) in the early 1990s to provide services over the existing incumbent's infrastructure have yet to be met. The local RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies, originally seven telcos created as a result of the break up of AT&T) have never really relinquished control of the local loop infrastructure in the United States and thus tied the customer to themselves. With enough power over the regulator (the FCC and the local Public Utility Commissi