 brought with it new management and a mandate to expand. It built a new $3.5 million [5] gold-plated data center in a renovated mill in Manchester, grew to 300 employ- ees, and began to expand southward into Massachusetts. Again aiming at busi- ness customers, it jumped headfirst into a market that was already getting crowded. Although it reportedly grew to 3,000 customers [6], including the New Hampshire state government, its Massachusetts collocations had far fewer subscribers, on average, than its older New Hampshire ones. It may well have been at break-even on its New Hampshire operations, but the allure of the larger market to its south was, quite literally, overwhelming. Digital Broadband Communications was based in Waltham, Mass., and had an even more dramatic business plan, building collocations into almost every Bell Atlantic central office in the state, including the smaller ones with only a few thousand lines. It won contracts from the state and from potentially large organizations such as the Massachusetts Association of Insurance Agents The Great Telecom Meltdown [7], but these were far from adequate; it averaged only a few subscribers per col- location and built several dozen that had acquired literally no customers during the company's short lifetime. Rounding out the situation was HarvardNet. Originally a small dial-up ISP in the town of Harvard, Mass., about 50 miles from Boston (thus giving it cover against any Harvard University complaints about its name), it received an infusion of venture funding and moved to Boston, where it built the obligatory data center. It entered the Web hosting business, and by June 2000 had installed DSL in 200 Bell Atlantic central offices [8]. It grew to 480 employees serving its 2,000 customers [9] in 85 cities and towns. Its original management team was replaced; the new CEO was an experienced salesman with little operational experience. So by mid-2000, competition for the DSL market in the Boston area was more than a little intense. Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, V