 building an alterna- tive network. Few people really understood what the AtHome network was. Much of it piggybacked on the same cables that carried HBO or ESPN programs to subscribers' homes. Even the modems through which customers' personal computers plugged into the high-speed network belonged to the cable companies, which leased them to subscribers. AtHome simply certified that the modems would work with the net- work. AtHome's equipment was further up the line, in the "head ends" where local cables connected to high-capacity fiber-optic lines. That was where AtHome usually placed data switches to manage the net- work's capacity. Those switches connected to twenty-five regional data centers where AtHome stored popular content, such as Yahoo! and Stay Off the Treadmill of Expectations CNN Web pages, SO that it would be readily accessible to customers. This was also where it kept the computers for managing e-mail and routing tables for Internet domain names. On their way to the In- ternet, data would travel between the head ends and the data centers over a high-speed local network owned by the cable companies. For carrying data over long distances, AtHome used a private AT&T net- work "backbone" that minimized the traffic jams that often snarl ordi- nary Internet traffic. In theory, the network could be expanded to handle any number of subscribers as long as the cable companies upgraded their lines to handle two-way data transmissions and AtHome added computers in its data centers. In practice, however, the number of subscribers grew SO fast that the regional data centers couldn't handle the traffic load. By the winter of 1999, AtHome's e-mail was out of service an average of fifty-five hours a week. The cable companies hired AT&T to audit the service and make recommendations for fixing it. Within days, AT&T's engineers concluded that AtHome's engi- neers were winging it. The service's capacity plan was never matched with the cable companies' estimates of demand. Furthermore, the data traffic on high-speed Inte