dustry now needed to generate new demand. Voice alone would not suffice. This first round of fiber-optic deployment depended on proprietary gear, whose lack of interoperability primarily benefited its manufacturers. The RBOCs recognized this as a problem. One of the first projects Bellcore undertook after it was created in 1984 was to develop a standard for fiber-optic transmission sys- items. Bellcore named this SONET, for Synchronous Optical Network [24]. This went through a multiyear standardization process, resulting in both a domestic SONET standard and a related, but not quite identical, international (ITU-T) standard called SDH, for synchronous digital hierarchy. The bottom speed of the SONET hierarchy, STS-1, was defined as 51.84 Mbps; higher STS rates were defined as integral multiples. Optical transmission systems were named OC-n, where the n represented the STS-equivalent data rate. STS-1 was designed to comfortably encapsulate the older DS3 digital streams, each of which encapsulated 28 DS-1 streams, the original T1-carrier rate. SONET transmission products were finally available for deployment in 1991, with the OC-48 transmission rate (2.488 Gbps) being particularly popu- lar. AT&T had already built out most of its network using prestandard gear, though future deployments were SONET. MCI, WilTel, and Sprint were, how- ever, large SONET customers, as were the Bell companies themselves. By the mid-1990s, most prestandard fiber-optic transmission gear had been replaced by SONET. The Great Telecom Meltdown ISDN Fails to Make a Dent Discussions of ISDN tend to bring out strong feelings among telecom and net- work professionals. Coinciding almost perfectly with the postdivestiture era, Integrated Services Digital Network was an ambitious worldwide program to evolve the public-switched telephone network from analog to digital. And while ISDN was quite successful in many other countries, it never quite caught on in the United States. Therein lies a tale of its own. It is hard to describe, in simple terms, ju