line sharing in exchange for his support for UNE Platform, the means by which CLECs resold voice services gotten from ILECs at a cost-base wholesale rate. DLECs were thus collateral damage in a political deal. Some DLECs took the bait and teamed up with voice CLECs, or added voice to their mix, in order to cover the higher cost of unshared loops. But a burgeoning busi- ness model had essentially been killed off by the ILECs' regulatory influence. It did little to help the investment climate for competitive providers. Ethernet LECs Were Data CAPs Just as the competitive access providers (see Chapter 7) were able to spend money prodigiously by laying fiber in the ground with the hope of selling tele- communications services to large business customers, a new breed of companies sprung up in the late 1990s with the goal of doing the same thing with pure data services. By bypassing SONET and using so-called Ethernet protocols instead, these companies convinced investors that they had created a viable lower-cost business model. They were not CLECs, which were by contrast wedded to old- fashioned telecom models; they were more often called ELECs, or Ethernet LECs. They were going to provide large businesses with the type of bargain Internet service that DLECs provided to homes and small business. Of course it did not quite work out very well for the ELECs, just as it did not work out very well for the CAPs and DLECs. It may be useful to digress into the magic behind the word "Ethernet." What the ELECs provided was a far cry from the original local area network invented at Xerox PARC in 1973. Ethernet was designed as a way to link DLECs and ELECs: An Exercise in Oversupply computers around a room or building. The first multivendor Ethernet standard, agreed upon by Xerox, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Intel in 1980, ran at 10 Mbps [15]. The name was an allusion to the "ether" of radio broadcasting; Ethernet broadcast bits onto a shared coaxial cable. Individual interfaces then listened to the 48-bit media access cont