he largest MSO of the early 1990s, TCI, was not SO comfort- able handling this newfangled Internet thingie by itself. It did not dawn on the leaders of the cable industry to work with established ISPs (not that many were well established by 1995) or, for that matter, to set themselves up as Inter- net access service providers selling wholesale access to other ISPs [13]. So along with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, TCI created @Home, an ISP dedi- cated to the cable industry. @Home signed multiyear exclusive deals with TCI and several other MSOs, some of whom took equity positions, and became one of the largest ISPs in the country; it also went public, raising billions of boom bucks. @Home might have been a success story, but it too fell victim to boom insanity. In 1999, all things Web were hot properties, especially "portals," Web sites that pointed to other Web sites and provided Web search services, liberally brushed with advertising. @Home offered a measly $6.7 billion for the number two portal, Excite. The merged company, Excite@Home, sold for nearly $100 a share at its 1999 peak. But in 2001, it joined the parade at the courthouse. As part of the bankruptcy deal, AT&T, which had purchased TCI a few years ear- lier, got ownership of the ISP assets while the portal's assets were auctioned off for a pittance. AT&T phased out @Home before selling its entire cable opera- tion to Comcast. Fiber to the Home Kept Moving Further into the Future The cable ISP stock business may have been weak, but the cable Internet busi- ness itself prospered, outselling ADSL by a substantial margin. In the key resi- dential and small business sector, FCC statistics showed that in December 1999, there were 1.4 million "high-speed" (more than 200 Kbps in at least one The Great Telecom Meltdown direction) cable modems, versus 291,000 ADSL lines, and only about a thou- sand fiber-optic (FTTH) lines nationwide. By December 2003, ADSL had grown to 8.9 million lines, whereas there were more than 16.4 million cable modems. ADSL's mark