 PBX may require several DS1s of trunk facili- ties. A typical cable telephony system does not have such highly concentrated capacity. And cable modems are generally highly asymmetric, with far more downstream bandwidth than upstream. That corresponds to residential data demand but not business use, which is far more symmetric. Voice bandwidth, of course, is also symmetric; its upstream requirement is a limiting factor for Pack- etCable capacity on a given piece of coax. DOCSIS 2.0, first marketed in 2003, dramatically improves upstream capacity (raising the maximum rate from 10 Mbps to 30 Mbps), SO there is more future likelihood of business use of cable networks. Competitive Access Providers, the Costly Way to Local Competition Exuberant Prices for Existing Systems as Industry Consolidated The boom years had their own impact on the cable industry. As with SO many other aspects of the communications and technology industries, stock prices rose, often to ridiculous levels, which seemingly encouraged mergers and acqui- sitions. Between 1993 and 2003, the bulk of the industry consolidated into a few large players, while fortunes were made and lost. To be sure, the cable industry had long been a game of Monopoly of sorts. MSOs routinely bought, sold, and traded territories, often trying to put together larger, more contiguous areas that could be operated more efficiently. This was a natural outcome from the way that many original cable franchises were awarded. In some states, franchises were awarded on the city or town level. In some large cities, such as Los Angeles, city governments encouraged rapid buildout by awarding multiple franchises. Several operators then built head ends and started building out from there; when they ran into a street that another operator had already wired, they stopped. Contrary to common belief, most franchises were nonexclusive; cable operators simply found it a better investment to be the first to serve a given location, not the second. Thus the monopolies that resulted were very much