ut 2 percent a year. 14 This was surely not the explosive growth anticipated from the information technology (IT) revolution and "deregulation." The lack of revenue growth does not mean that there was no real out- put growth in telecommunications-which was actually substantial, The First Eight Years under the New Law Table 3-1. Recent Bankruptcies of Telecommunications Carriers Long-distance and Competitive wholesale fiber carriers local-exchange carriers Wireless carriers 360 Networks Adelphia Business Solutions Advanced Radio Telecom Aleron Allegiance Telecom GlobalStar Cambrian Communications Broadband Office Iridium Carrier 1 Convergent Communications Metricom/Ricochet Digital Transport Covad Communications Motient Ebone/GTS CTC Communications Nextwave Telecom Enron Broadband e.spire OmniSky FLAG Telecom FastComm StarBand Global Crossing ICG Communications Teligent ITC^DeltaCom Winstar laxas Knology Impsat Metromedia Fiber Network KPNQwest McLeod USA Neon Communications Mpower Pangea Network Plus Sigma Networks New Global Telecom Sphera NorthPoint Storm Telecommunications Teleglobe Telergy Rhythms NetConnections 360networks Velocita Song Networks Viatel XO Communications Williams Communications WINfirst WorldCom Yipes Communications Zephion Source: Converge! Network Digest, accessed at www.convergedigest.com/Mergers/financialarticle.asp? ID=4160 (January 20, 2003) and http://quote.yahoo.com. though not as high as expected. 15 Rather, output did not increase enough to offset the steep decline in prices that was occurring. Indeed, the price of transmitting the trillions of bits of information generated by the Internet fell dramatically, but demand did not rise sufficiently to boost revenues. As is clear from figure 3-5, which shows the recent trend in the telecom indus- try's contribution to GDP in real and nominal terms, real output in this sector failed to double even every two or three years after 1996. The First Eight Years under the New Law Figure 3-3. Current Dollar Investment and Output in the U.S. Telec