 per month.) Instead, it focused on providing SDSL to business subscribers, which were will- ing to pay more per month. Working in conjunction with many independent ISPs as its wholesale customers, Covad positioned its SDSL service as a lower- cost alternative to ILEC T1 channels, which frequently cost an ISP more than $200, even within a city. It was hard to see where Covad or for that matter any DLEC was going to make its profits under those conditions, but if it did pick up a substantial share of business data lines, and only built out in large enough central offices, then it had a chance of making a profit. Early DLECs had to pay several hundred dol- lars per line for their DSLAMs (the central office end of DSL), plus monthly backhaul fees for every collocation-to connect their DSLAMs to their regional hubs-of several hundred to more than a thousand dollars per month. But this was the late 1990s, a time when profit was largely seen as an obsolete concept; DLECs were building revenue, riding the wave, positioning themselves, build- ing a "story," whatever! ILECs Controlled the Mass Market for DSL The ILECs began to roll out ADSL in 1996, but their pace was leisurely. Deployment focused on the largest central offices, which had the fastest path to profitability but also seemed to follow the cable companies. If a cable company The Great Telecom Meltdown was installing cable modem service in a given area, ADSL seemed more likely to be deployed. In most cases, cable outsold ADSL, but ADSL was a far higher- volume product than the business SDSL that the DLECs featured. In 1998, the FCC issued a ruling that broadened the data CLECs' hori- zons. It created a new UNE, referring to the data portion of a shared loop as the "high frequency element" (HFE), or "high frequency portion of the loop" (HFPL), ordering ILECs to make it available to CLECs at the same price they imputed to their own ADSL services. A few ILECs had previously made shared loops available at a discount to the full loop rate; Covad, for instance, had b