Some Robber Barons Produce Positive Results

This is not my plea to free Bernie Ebbers or to posthumously pardon Ken Lay. The latter may rest in some peace however knowing that he didn’t just preside over one of the largest acts of corporate thievery ever but helped lay (multiple puns) the groundwork for many of technological advances that are the hallmark of web 2.0. The general availability of upskirt video and Youtube will forever be one of the lasting achievements of the previous decade. These things will be — already enjoyed by college student worlwide — recognized as being an advance in productivity that was the result of the fiber optic gold rush of the late 90’s.

I got to enjoy some of the rush (about 3 months) before the damn broke which swept us all out to sea in the reverse flow. I’d been involved in a startup that was one of the first attempts to commercialize MPEG 4 over standard broadband. We had some remarkable success in those early days and its a subject for another post or series of posts.

The point is that we were funded by a fiber network needing some visual spice to perk up the dog and pony show it had to provide its potential investors. We were both the dog and pony and it worked to a large extent. When every any of the unconvinced fund managers or VCs would pipe up to the effect that maybe there was no market for all the bandwidth they would whip out the old laptop and show the nearly DVD quality encoded Matrix that became our Hallmark. (Warner was not amused btw and we took it down).

They — the company — were able to raise 10s of millions which was relative chicken feed up against the hundreds of billions being lavished on the fiber companies in anticipation of the broadband revolution. That revolution turned out to be more of an evolution thus helping to drive many of the players from the field when the revenues didn’t materialze before the damn broke open and the pool of cash drained into the war in Iraq.

However the unheralded legacy can be quickly seen by looking at the snapshot graphic above. Its just one of the many fiber networks feeding into my new favorite server provider – Softlayer. I admit this is unscientific but its a good indication of the level of surplus in bandwidth left by the 90s goldrush in the telecommunications fiber optic business.