sed one. IP-network equipment providers had, before 1993, sold most of their gear to enterprise networks, a steady if unglamorous business. Some sales were made, of course, to the NSFnet members and other public providers, but absent public access to the Internet, that channel was constrained. The creation of an ISP sec- tor practically overnight caused a surge in demand. Large routers were needed for backbone nodes and regional points of presence; small "edge" routers were deployed at customer sites. Going into the mid-1990s, the "big four" companies dominated the field: Cisco, Bay Networks (formerly Wellfleet), Cabletron, and 3Com were all successful in selling routers to enterprise customers. The public Internet boom primarily benefited Cisco, which pulled away from the competi- tion. By early 2000, Cisco's market capitalization was the highest of any publicly traded company in the world. Even more interesting, Cisco's growth was largely organic, as it added products and grew market share in a fast-growing market, though to be sure it did acquire numerous smaller companies for their technol- ogy. Also-ran Bay Networks had merged with Northern Telecom, a major manufacturer of telephone equipment, becoming Nortel Networks; it never achieved Cisco's boom-era valuation but did share in the crash to come. Another giant, Lucent Technologies, had only been spun off from AT&T as the boom was getting underway. It was to some extent a beneficiary of both the Telecom Act and the Internet boom. The Internet generated demand for second telephone lines to be used for modems. Lucent and Nortel, the two dominant central office switch vendors, busily filled orders from the incumbent telephone companies as the last of the analog switches were phased out [31] and The Great Telecom Meltdown the existing digital switches were expanded. At the same time, the ISPs them- selves needed dial-in capacity, which was mostly met with T1 interfaces on the switches, typically configured as ISDN primary rate interfaces. So the ILECs placed or