width, leading to the exhaust of intercity fiber-optic routes that had been built during the preced- ing decade. It also created demand for local bandwidth to alleviate the "last mile" pressures resulting from traditional local telephone company rate struc- tures, with their voice orientation. And equally importantly, it created a demand for investment opportunities. As a booming sector of a fast-growing economy, telecommunications was attractive to individual and institutional investors alike, in both debt and equity markets. And where capital is available, it is always easy to find someone willing to take it. Even before the height of the boom, capital availability was improving for many telecommunications projects. During the 1980s, MCI, for instance, had been highly dependent on high-yield debt (junk bonds), as the competitive long distance sector was not yet profitable, but by the 1990s a more competitive mar- ketplace was shaping up, and investors took notice. Still, a number of major ini- tiatives were largely handled via private capital. The competitive access providers (CAPs), for instance, which provided fiber-optic last-mile bandwidth to busi- ness customers even before the Telecom Act opened up local competition, were financed by large corporations. Merrill Lynch helped finance Teleport, the first CAP, in order to reduce its own telecommunications costs; it was later owned by a group of cable television operators that also provided it with rights-of-way and other operational services. Metropolitan Fiber Systems, another CAP, was largely owned by Peter Kiewit Sons' Inc., a large construction firm. A number of large corporations also invested in long distance networks that were eventually rolled up into WorldCom. The Great Telecom Meltdown The players that built the costliest new networks in the 1990s were not newcomers to the industry. They had a track record. They had generally done what venture capitalists most like to see done-built and sold a company. Run- ning it at a profit was not the type of tr