Telecom-style revolution is beyond our reach.
Michael T. Burr is Fortnightly’s editor-in-chief. Email him at burr@pur.com.
Midway through my career as a magazine editor, I took a detour from covering the electricity industry and went to work for the Telephony magazine group in Chicago. The year was 2000, and the dot-com boom was at its peak. New companies were going public every day, raising billions of dollars in equity capital. Growth seemed unstoppable, and I was excited to be writing about such a dynamic industry.
Then the dot-com bubble burst, erasing billions of dollars in market capitalization within several months. Dozens of upstart carriers went bankrupt, taking some industry stalwarts down with them. The hardware that companies had installed was now largely redundant. Shiny new data centers sat empty; massive fiber optic networks stayed dark. The telecom market dried up, and after less than two years covering telecom, my job was eliminated.