le. Bell Atlantic made no attempt to engineer a more eco- nomical solution: If the subscriber wanted numbers in a town where it had a 1AESS electromechanical switch, then by gum it would use that switch-even if, as was usually the case, the lines were foreign exchange, actually delivered to the ISP elsewhere. Pacific Bell also decried how Internet growth would cause it to have to spend $100 million more on capital upgrades in 1997 than it had planned. That sounds like a lot of money to the average consumer, though it was only a modest percentage increase given the size of Pacific Bell's California market and the amount of growth in the state's economy that year. But the FCC did not stamp out the Internet revolution, and the network did not collapse. Instead, the CLECs rode in to the rescue. CLECs installed doz- ens of large central office switches between 1996 and 1998 whose primary mis- sion was serving dial-in modems. Some CLEC start-ups were primarily aimed at that marketplace. PacWest in California and Global NAPs in Massachusetts were among the larger examples; a number of ISPs also started their own CLEC affiliates in order to "offload" their modems from the ILEC network. CLECs had many natural advantages for this market. They could move much faster. They also looked at ISPs as customers to be delighted, rather than, as ILECs seemed to, as ratepayers that they were being forced to serve. And they offered the ISPs collocation, something ILECs never did. By putting their modems in the collocation rooms at CLEC sites, ISPs' local loops were merely interior cables. This alone often saved hundreds of dollars per T1. Some CLECs opened carrier hotels for ISPs, centered around their switches. These tended to have staying power because they offered a service that independent carrier hotels often lacked and dial-in ISPs needed. Other times, CLECs located their switches in other companies' carrier hotels, SO that they could take advantage of available transmission facilities and be less dependent on the ILEC, while st