In the latter half of the 1990s, telecom companies in the U.S. laid enough new fiber-optic cable to spark a 50 percent increase in total route miles—and a thousand-fold increase in bandwidth, thanks to miraculous advances in the underlying technology. Yet demand rose only a hundred-fold in this time, creating an imbalance that led, inevitably, to a crushing shakeout: $1 trillion in lost stock-market value, $275 billion in defaulted debt, 225,000 axed jobs, dozens of dead companies and a handful of breathtakingly large bankruptcies.
