es that could get the capital and rights-of-way to lay in a nationwide fiber-optic backbone. Without their own traditional business to jeopardize, they could sell IRUs and thus share the risk of building new networks. Qwest Follows Sprint's Lead Along the Rails The first of these new nationwide networks to be built was Qwest. The com- pany was begun by Phillip Anschutz, who had, in the 1980s, purchased the Southern Pacific Railroad. The railroad itself had a history in telecom: Sprint began as the Southern Pacific Communications Company, which had built a microwave network along the railroad's rights-of-way. Many railroads owned their own microwave transmission facilities for internal use; Sprint was the first one that became a competitive long distance carrier after that opportunity arose. But Sprint was acquired by GTE, and later by United Telecom (today's Sprint Corp.), before 1988, when Anschutz bought the railroad. Anschutz only kept the railroad for eight years, but when he sold it to the Union Pacific, he kept the rights-of-way to lay fiber along the tracks. Qwest refined the art of trenching fiber-optic cable alongside railroad tracks. It planned an initial network of approximately 13,000 route miles of 96 The Great Telecom Meltdown strands of the latest dispersion-shifted fiber, [2] and in 1997 the company hired Joseph Nacchio, a senior AT&T executive, as CEO. Qwest sold an IRU for 48 strands of its fiber to Frontier Communications for an undisclosed price, and it sold an IRU for 24 strands to GTE Corp. for a sum reportedly just over half a billion dollars. So before the first strand of fiber was actually lit in late 1997, most had been presold as IRUs, covering much of its construction cost. By 1998, as the network was coming on line, Qwest's market capitalization had reached $6 billion. By 1999, Qwest had purchased RBOC US West, and its market capitalization exceeded $65 billion. Frontier had also been acquired, by international carrier Global Crossing, which sold off the local exchange net- works, and