. And down the road in Marlborough, Mass., 1998 start-up Telica Inc. built a large-scale switch with both TDM and VoIP capabilities. Funded, like many of its neighbors, by top-tier venture firms, it had some success in penetrat- ing both ILEC and CLEC markets. It was acquired by Lucent Technologies in 2004 for $295 million, a relatively happy outcome for investors in these companies. That might sound like a good selection of switch vendors, but they were not alone; they were just the survivors. Siemens, for instance, funded a boom-era start-up, Unisphere, that was going to produce a next-generation switch. It pulled the plug a few years later. Ironically, Unisphere and Sonus once shared a building in Westford, Mass., that had earlier been occupied by minicomputer giant Digital Equipment Corp. A New Jersey start-up, Tachion Networks, planned an ambitious product that was at once a central office switch, a SONET multiplexor, and an IP, ATM, and Frame Relay switch. It heroically The Great Telecom Meltdown planned to build this using 18-layer printed circuits. It did not work. The com- pany folded in 2001. Gluon Networks was building the CLX "converged local exchange," integrating a switch, a media gateway, and a DSLAM in a Taqua- sized package. The Petaluma, Calif.-based company ran out of money; its assets were acquired by bargain-hunter Zhone Technologies in 2004 for a mere $7 million. And one of the industry's earliest post-1996 switch failures was Salix, which was building a large-scale TDM/VoIP switch when it was acquired by equipment giant Tellabs for about $300 million in early 2000. It never came to market; Tellabs pulled the plug in mid-2001, as the Illinois-based parent com- pany was bracing for the meltdown. UNE-P Dominated CLEC Statistical Growth Once the meltdown began, investment in new facilities-based CLECs slowed to a crawl. True, the existing capacity of boom-era CLEC switches was very lightly utilized. But absent a developed wholesale business of sales between CLECs, and given the cost of tying CL