d to other carriers' bandwidth or switchless resellers of a larger carrier. [23] AT&T began, of course, with the huge market share resulting from its past monopoly. MCI and Sprint were the largest competitors, whereas several other companies, such as ITT Corp. and Metromedia, had built smaller regional or national networks of their own. The Williams Companies, a natural gas pipeline firm from Oklahoma, created a "carrier's carrier," WilTel, to sell wholesale bandwidth at DS3 and above, using empty pipelines as fiber- optic conduits. MCI used substantial amounts of WilTel fiber and also had deals with railroads to lay fiber along their rights-of-way. AT&T had a patchwork of rights-of-way inherited from the Bell System days, when local and long distance Divestiture: Equal Access and Chinese Walls were not cleanly separated. It laid in fiber, providing the company with ample bandwidth between major points of presence. Sprint's original microwave net- work was entirely replaced by fiber; a microwave tower was even ceremonially demolished for a television commercial. Of course Sprint's all-fiber network did not go to nearly as many places as AT&T's; the latter depended on microwave for some of its thinner routes. And while AT&T was able to modernize its net- work and remain competitive, the rapid pace of fiber-optic deployment caused it to take a huge write-off for its undepreciated (and historically underdepreci- ated) analog plant. With fiber-optic networks in place, the telecommunications industry was facing a conundrum. Before fiber, bandwidth had been scarce; this made it easy to hold long distance rates high. Incremental bandwidth requirements often required incremental capital expenditure. With fiber in the ground, however, the incremental cost of bandwidth was extremely low. A company might need more electronics in order to light spare strands of fiber or upgrade the speed of an already-lit strand, but this expenditure paled in contrast to the cost of laying the fiber into the ground in the first place. The in