ack record that counted; selling out quickly was the more favored course. Thus, a group of networks sprang up that can be called the "Deuteronomy Networks" because, like the biblical book that is largely a second telling of the law, these networks were a second telling of their founders' "story." Unlike television viewers, investors often prefer reruns. The Short-Term Bandwidth Crunch Invited More Suppliers As the ISP business grew and bandwidth became scarce, the market became ripe for an additional provider of long-haul service. AT&T was the largest provider of interstate voice service, but it was not a major player in the bulk bandwidth market. Its prices were too high to compete, and its network's capacity may have been too low. AT&T's network was a legacy of its ownership of the Bell System. Its rights-of-way were a hodge-podge, often shared with local Bells, and thus for it to pull additional fiber would have been particularly difficult. AT&T also suf- fered from being an early adopter of fiber optics: It had built much of its net- work in the late 1980s, before higher-bandwidth SONET equipment had come on the market. So it rationally stuck to its knitting, focusing on higher-value voice services, such as 800 service [1] numbers, which had once been an AT&T monopoly and remained a growth market after the introduction of toll-free number portability. MCI and Sprint were both heavily invested in SONET. The original fiber-optic networks pulled by AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and Wiltel were being marketed in the usual manner, as services. Subscribers could get a voice-grade channel, DS1 "high-capacity" channel, or a DS3 channel. But they were not in the fiber-optic business. Of course neither were the RBOCs; the mere thought of leasing dark fiber to subscribers was enough to put the aver- age Bellhead into fits of apoplexy. Fiber optics was a tool that these telecommu- nications service providers used to create their services. Sure, Sprint advertised its fiber network and even changed its stock ticker to FON (a double e