 one network. It depended on pulling optical fiber to the home (FTTH) and was designed to carry high- definition television at an estimated required bandwidth of 100 to 120 Mbps. (This turned out to be far more than actually required.) So the people working on B-ISDN saw it as a very long-term goal, something that would probably not see widespread deployment until, say, the late 1990s! A lot happened between 1985 and the late 1990s, of course! In the narrow context of B-ISDN plans, the first practical ATM switches did not hit the mar- ket until after 1990, when Fore Systems introduced an ATM-based 100-Mbps LAN switch. This tilted ATM development away from the metropolitan and wide area networks of B-ISDN and toward LANs, and the most important forum for ATM standardization moved from the ITU to the ATM Forum, which was founded in 1991. In the early 1990s, RBOCs in numerous states made promises that they would provide high-speed (50 Mbps or more) fiber to the home within the next decade, provided that they were freed from rate-of- return regulation. That resulted in the Bells' being moved to a new form of regulation, price caps, which allowed them to adjust their prices within a certain range (typically keyed to the rate of inflation, minus an annual expected- productivity-boost factor) and keep any remaining profits. The Bells profited handsomely from this but never pulled the fiber [12]. And Bell-company video-on-demand trials ended in the mid-1990s. Hybrid Fiber-Coax Is Developed Now let's set the wayback machine to 1989. Fiber optics had become ubiqui- tous in the long-haul and interoffice telephone networks, but the CATV indus- try was still using coaxial cable. Because coaxial cable has substantial attenuation that rises with frequency, CATV networks of the day required amplifiers every few blocks. Amplifiers added noise; adding two-way services required all of the amplifiers in the path to be upgraded. As many as 30 amplifiers could sit between a head end and the subscriber; bandwidth was typically limited 