 fixed-wire networks are not very good. At best, they are likely to maintain their current level of nominal revenues. At worst, if VoIP begins to grow rapidly, revenues may continue to decline. The Bell Companies versus Other Incumbents When the Bell companies were divested from AT&T in 1984, the incum- bents consisted of the Bell group, a number of other independent tele- phone companies, and the partly owned Cincinnati Bell and Southern Effect of the 1996 Act on Incumbent Local Companies New England Telephone Company. These latter companies were not con- strained by the line-of-business restrictions in the AT&T consent decree or by the subsequent competitive "checklist" requirements in Section 271 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. By the late 1990s, there were only three large publicly listed independents left: Cincinnati Bell, ALLTEL, and Citizens. The others had become part of much larger companies or were too small to be listed on the national stock exchanges. 27 These three independent companies were free to pursue expansion strategies in the new telecom world unlocked by the 1996 act since they were not limited to providing intraLATA services. In fact, two of them, ALLTEL and Citizens, remained local carriers that did not change their modus operandi significantly, but Cincinnati Bell changed its name to Broadwing, acquired a new national carrier, IXC, and launched an ambi- tious expansion strategy. In 2000-01 Broadwing spent more than $1 bil- lion on fiber-optic transmission facilities, despite the fact that its national, broadband transmission division had annual revenues of just $860 million in those years. 28 Its total capital expenditure budget had only been $143 million in 1998, but it spent $844 million on capital facilities in 2000 alone. Like many of the long-distance companies and CLECs, Broadwing plunged into the new Internet age with abandon. The results were predictable. A comparison of the stock market performance of the Bell companies and the three large, unconstrained ILECs reveals a surge