bone ISPs to bring in fiber-optic connections and rent space by the rack. ISPs and telecom carriers were happy to show up because these buildings were full of potential customers. Renting a 23-inch space for $1,000 per month was certainly more than landlords could get for office space, even in the boom years' overheated market. Thus, Adam Smith's prediction came true again: Lack of supply caused an increase in price, which led to an increase in supply as more "carrier hotels" opened. By early 2000, speculative announcements of new carrier hotels were well out of hand. In the Boston market, existing ISP-based facilities at WorldCom, Level 3, and Network Plus had high occupancy rates. An independent carrier hosting company called CO Space was doing well too; CLECs such as Global NAPs also had plenty of tenants. Of course many of their tenants were dotcoms The Internet Boom and the Limits to Growth with shaky business models that were not long for the world, but the real estate industry was not prepared to see that. Investors (to use that word in its loosest sense) were clamoring to enter the business. So a number of new facilities were announced. An old Raytheon factory in Waltham, Mass., the former Wonder Bread bakery in Natick, Mass., the upper floors of the former Jordan Marsh department store in downtown Boston, and an old warehouse in Allston, Mass., were all on the developers' agendas. None opened. The Allston building, promi- nently located along the Massachusetts Turnpike, was pretentiously named Bos- ton Internet City. The developer got as far as removing the building's exterior walls by the time the carrier hotel business collapsed. The building sat for years sheathed in cloth before being redeveloped for the Next Big Thing, biotechnol- ogy. But that's another tale. The Bubble Bursts in Equipment Manufacturers' Faces The boom years were good to manufacturers of both telecom and Internet gear. This stands to follow; capital gear is highly cyclical, and the 1990s were both a strong business cycle and a focu