and France Telecom [9]. This was the normal business model; carriers received capacity in proportion to their investment. But during the boom, undersea cables became another area for investors to squander their surplus cash. In 1997, Atlantic Crossing was proposed by new- comer Global Telesystems Ltd. as a 40-Gbps fiber link between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. By the end of the year, the com- pany had renamed itself Global Crossing Ltd. and added a cable to Japan (Pacific Crossing) and one to the Caribbean (Mid-Atlantic Crossing) to its plans. By 1998, the company, nominally based in the tax haven of Bermuda but actually run from New Jersey, added plans for Pan European Crossing, a terres- trial network among many of Europe's largest cities. In 1999, it announced plans for additional fiber in Asia. It also tried to purchase RBOC US West but lost out to fellow boomer Qwest. As a consolation prize, it acquired Frontier Communications, which had a second-tier domestic long distance network (originally called Allnet) as well as a mid-sized independent ILEC. After Global Crossing sold the ILEC business to Citizens Communications, it kept the fiber, which of course was largely in the form of Qwest IRUs. All of this ambitious growth came at a cost, of course. Had its sales projections been correct, it might have worked. But then whose were? Chapter 11 followed. The company was acquired in 2003 by Singapore Technologies Telemedia for $250 million. FLAG Telecom (named for "fiber link around the globe") planned to spend $1.5 billion to lay 27,000 miles of undersea cable. More of a carrier's car- rier than Global Crossing, it was more speculative than previous consortium The Great Telecom Meltdown cables. Its largest owner (38%) was Bell Atlantic, which in 1996, when FLAG was announced, was far smaller than the company it grew into as Verizon. Its planned route, which was to have 8 Gbps of capacity, went mostly undersea from England to Japan by way of Egypt, Dubai, Thailand, and China [10]. Some of F