l rural ILEC called the Interstate and Valley Tele- phone Co. (ITC). ITC was also the original parent company of ISP Mindspring, which was merged into Earthlink in 1999. Knology overbuilt cable networks in a number of cities, mostly in the South, and acquired other systems, including some lines originally pulled by GTE. But it remained unprofitable a decade after its founding; it had, however, achieved EBITDA profitability, put- ting it ahead of many boom-era companies. The other big overbuilder was New Jersey-based RCN Corp. The com- pany emerged in 1997 out of a set of predecessor companies, some of which were connected to Kiewit's MFS. RCN's role was essentially to take over the residential side of the business ("residential communications network"). Its larg- est owners ended up being fellow Kiewit spin-off Level 3 and Microsoft co- founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures (which also took a controlling interest in Charter Cable). Allen is both famously rich and a famously feckless investor, having lost money on an uncountable number of companies (which Allen, founder of Seattle's Science Fiction Museum, might say were simply ahead of their time). RCN was one of his biggest losers. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2004, it plowed through money at a prodigious rate, losing close to $4 billion in the previous five years. But to some extent RCN's problems were a result of its boom mentality, not inherent in all overbuilds. For example, when it first entered the Boston The Great Telecom Meltdown market in the late 1990s, it spent heavily on television and side-of-buses adver- tising, among other media. Yet its services were only available at the time in a tiny fraction of the metropolitan area. The best it could do for most potential customers was to resell ILEC telephone service and provide dial-up Internet service via a series of ISPs that it had acquired during the boom, at boom prices. It did eventually overbuild much of Boston and nearby cities and towns, but it was overbuilding some of MediaOne's, which became AT