nd 1995, but the fastest growth was in the late 1980s [16]. Data traffic was growing much more rapidly. ISPs were suddenly having trouble getting DS3 circuits to add to their backbones. To be sure, fiber optics themselves have huge potential capacity. But upgrading the capacity on a given strand requires new opto-electronic equip- ment. Lighting up new strands of fiber often requires new repeaters and other gear to be installed along the path. Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) had not become commonplace by 1996, SO fiber strands were running out of capacity relatively quickly. Basic economics, going back to Adam Smith, indicates what is likely to happen when a commodity-for that is all that raw bandwidth is-is in short supply. Prices may rise, and new suppliers are tempted to enter the market. But the telecommunications business, especially the long-haul backbone bandwidth market, is not like the ones that Smith dealt with in eighteenth-century Britain. It is a large-dollar long-term investment. It only makes sense if there is a high probability that supply will not severely exceed demand, which would lead to a precipitous fall in price. Demand forecasting is thus critical. Short-Term Versus Long-Term Trends Many people believed, during the boom, that Internet traffic was doubling roughly every 100 days. This fantasy was based on statements made by World- Com in the 1997 time frame. It was widely repeated, becoming the basis of many market research firms' forecasts of demand for all things Internet. It led financiers to put up trillions of dollars in capital. After all, demand would soon catch up with whatever supply could be built. Right? Wrong. WorldCom's estimate was no more precise than its corporate accounting turned out to be. David Faber of CNBC traced it to Tom Stluka, an employee of WorldCom's UUNET subsidiary. Stluka "created a best-case scenario for the Internet's growth," reported Faber [17]. "Stluka's model suggested that in the best of all possible worlds Internet traffic would double every 100