LAG's network did get built, but it went bankrupt in 2002 under $2.5 billion of debt. Other ambitious undersea networks were planned during the boom, some getting further than others. The biggest plan was called Project Oxygen. Little- known CTR Group announced it in 1997. The network was to have 320,000 kilometers of undersea cable touching 171 countries. It never got the $10 billion that it needed, though. Dreams like this required deep pockets, since undersea cable can be extremely costly. One description goes like this: The cost of a trans-Atlantic cable is roughly the cost of that length of $10 bills, rolled up end to end. To cross the Pacific, substitute hundreds. As a result of the glut of undersea bandwidth, costs of transoceanic calls plummeted. Bulk bandwidth between the United States and Europe became inexpensive, and even Asian routes became far more affordable. Who would have expected that some flat-rate North American calling plans would throw Hong Kong in to the bargain? By 2004, a New York to London STM-4 [11] cir- cuit (622 Mbps) was being offered at $7,500 per month. That is more band- width than the entire TAT-9 of a dozen years earlier! The original investors in the cables, however experienced they might have been in other areas, were not the ones making the money. How Much Bandwidth Was Available? The potential capacity of fiber-optic networks has increased dramatically since the original transcontinental fiber networks were laid in the 1980s. In 1985, it was common to install 135-Mbps fiber, capable of carrying three DS3 signals; this was a huge improvement over earlier systems, and it was adequate for the day's applications. The highest-capacity trunk routes required multiple strands, but extra strands were always pretty cheap, compared with laying the pipe in the ground in the first place. High-end systems of the day operated at up to 565 Mbps, trumping the capacity of any earlier coaxial cable or microwave radio system. SONET was standardized in the 1980s and first hit the market around 1