Look at the old mandates that require the firms we used to call telephone companies to maintain their copper-wire phone lines and voice-call switching infrastructure.

FORBES: Big Broadband's Secret Plan to Deliver Wildly Popular Content and Apps to Happy Consumers

RareWire delivered its demo for the iPad app in 24 hours, using a skimpy 4, 000 lines of WIRE code.

FORBES: The Startup Riding Google's Fiber-Optic Superhighway

Frenzied women in burqas searching for relatives broke through police lines and past concertina wire intended to cordon off the scene.

WSJ: Attacks Point to New Afghan Conflict

It costs less than ISDN or T1 lines, it flows over existing copper wire and, unlike cable, its bandwidth doesn't diminish as more neighbors hop onboard.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Whether it's phone wire used for dial-up and digital subscriber lines (DSL), or the coaxial cables that carry cable modem connections, these connections are a bottleneck between the carrier's big pipes and your bandwidth-starved computer.

FORBES

In the early days of FORBES magazine, which was founded 90 years ago, "network" referred to a chain of radio stations hooked up by wire--and, long before that, to intersecting roads, canals, railways and telegraph lines.

FORBES: Networks