ioned Bell Atlantic filing suggested that if the CLECs did not like paying reciprocal compensation, or thought that the rate was too high, then maybe they should seek out customers who received more calls than they made, such as Internet service providers. And that is exactly what the CLECs did. Reciprocal compensation helped fund the initial buildout of ISP- serving CLEC network capacity. ILECs had dictated initial reciprocal compen- sation rates, albeit with state consent; absent cost studies, some of these rates were quite high. Some of the early Bell Atlantic interconnection agreements set the reciprocal compensation rate at 0.8 cents per minute. A single PRI serving ISP modems could easily carry 250,000 minutes per month; at that price, it would generate $2,000 per month of reciprocal compensation. Combined with virtual NXX to ensure a wide local calling area, many CLECs were, by 1998, doing quite well. ILECs on the Attack Naturally, the ILECs were not happy about this situation, the monster they had unwittingly created. And they were certainly not going to actually compete for the ISPs' business, not when they had been calling for all such calls to be switched access. But there were a couple of exceptions. One ILEC, Connecti- cut's independent Southern New England Telephone, not yet owned by SBC, built a statewide "full house" of its own for ISPs, using a dedicated offload switch. GTE, not yet owned by Bell Atlantic/Verizon, also had an offload The Great Telecom Meltdown service, CyberPOP; while covering its own major territories, it was largely tar- geted at the many Bell company subscribers who were within local calling range of a GTE switch. Bell Atlantic's own offload service, Internet Protocol Routing Service (IPRS), seemed to be primarily designed for the use of its own ISP sub- sidiary. No, the ILECs were not going to take the CLEC's reciprocal compensa- tion windfall lying down; they were going to fight them the way they knew best, with lawyers. So by 1998, Bell Atlantic, and soon the other ILECs, w