When Enron tried to corner the Internet market
By Adam Gaffin, NetworkWorld.com, 05/16/05
In 1999, Ken Norton was chief technical officer at Snap, an NBC spinoff that was going to become your broadband content provider (what? never heard of them?). He posts a fascinating (and long, set aside some time) account of the time he met with Enron officials over a possible joint venture, back when Enron had plans to set up a market for excess Internet bandwidth. The discussions included a trip to an Enron NOC in Los Angeles that housed brand-new Lucent all-optical switches with 256 optical ports and 10 terabits of capacity:
... Once my amazement died down, I noticed something curious. The switches were cool, alright, but there was something unusual. There weren't any cables connected to the ports except for one lone OC-3 cable. That left 511 empty ports. "When are you going to hook those up?," I asked. "Very soon," was the terse answer, as we were marched into the next room. ...
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