Although he had answered questions effortlessly in the press conference earlier that afternoon, even Malone, the cerebral cable billionaire, hadn't yet fully grasped the implications of what he had just done-a $48 billion deal, one of the largest media mergers in history, that promised to blanket millions of homes with a panoply of interactive digital services that Malone had dreamed of for years. TCI's coaxial cable wires could deliver data and Internet traffic at speeds unmatched by the nation's telephone companies, making them crucial to the expansion of the Internet. The deal would
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