 days." Stluka was not reporting on growth but speculating on sales forecasts. But it got a life of its own, and WorldCom's 1998 annual report stated-based on Stluka's fore- cast, by then much retold-that the Internet was growing at 1,000% a year. WorldCom later claimed that there was some truth to the number: Its backbone network's bandwidth capacity was indeed growing extremely rapidly during a The Great Telecom Meltdown brief period of time, when UUNET was rapidly building out its network and catching up with demand [18]. But even that excuse does not quite ring true. Even if actual Internet traffic had doubled during some 100-day period in the mid-1990s, short-term growth does not extrapolate into a long-term trend. Growth rates in new technologies frequently follow an "S"-like curve. The growth rate turns suddenly steep as early adopters give way to the mainstream, then levels off further as the market saturates. Andrew Odlyzko's study, Internet Traffic Growth: Sources and Implications, reported that traffic on U.S. Internet backbones rose from 16.3 Tbytes per month in 1994 to 1,500 Tbytes per month in 1996. This hundredfold growth reflects the opening up of the Internet to the broad public, with huge pent-up demand fueling a one-time burst of growth. He estimated 5,000-8,000 Tbytes per month in 1998. This is more like 100% per year than 1,000%. Traffic dou- bling annually is certainly impressive, but it would not have been enough to fuel all of the investments made during the boom. The doubling-every-hundred- days estimate was instead repeated as if it were gospel truth, a permanent rule of nature, becoming a favorite of the Wall Street "analysts" who blessed every cockamamie proposal to come along. WorldCom Set a Suspicious Pace It is not entirely a coincidence that SO much of the meltdown came about because of investments built on a WorldCom lie. WorldCom itself came to embody the era, a company that seemingly "got" the Internet. After it had acquired MFS, a pioneering competitive local exchange carrier (