ad the company not failed. Even with its strike price of zero, Veri- zon did not choose to exercise the options. After blowing through several billion dollars in a few years, Genuity's assets, including a nationwide IP network and many high-end customers, were picked up by Level 3 for a mere pittance, $242 million. Still, Level 3 was far from profitable. Williams Sold Wiltel, Created Another One The Williams Companies, a large natural gas pipeline operator from Tulsa, early on recognized the value of its rights-of-way to the telecom industry. In the early postdivestiture years, it began pulling optical fiber through decommissioned pipelines. This led to the first Wiltel, a nationwide wholesale fiber-optic net- work that operated as a "carrier's carrier." In 1991, Wiltel introduced the first common carrier Frame Relay service, an economical alternative to private lines for private data networks. But the bulk of its business was DS3 circuits to cus- tomers such as MCI. At one point a major provider of operator services became indebted to it; Wiltel acquired the company, putting it into the retail service business. But in early 1995, before it became a household name, it was acquired by LDDS, which then renamed itself WorldCom. Williams, though, did not entirely give up its telecom ambitions. Although it entered into a three-year noncompete agreement with WorldCom, it retained its rights-of-way and kept a token strand of fiber along its routes. It also retained ownership of Vyvx, a small carrier specializing in video distribution. It kept ownership of the Wiltel trade- mark, which in 1997 it used for a PBX-servicing business that it acquired from Nortel. On the day the noncompete agreement with WorldCom expired [6], Wil- liams announced that it was back in the long-haul carrier business. The new Williams Communications had fiber optics along what were by then well- trodden routes. And because it was already 1998, Williams was a bit late to the The Deuteronomy Networks party. Qwest was well along on construction of i