BANDWIDTH

Caruso, one of the founders of the Zayo Group, chronicles the tumultuous trajectory of the bandwidth industry and his role in its rise.

The conventional history of the origins of the internet focuses on an explosion of new software and the proliferation of commercial websites, but in Caruso’s retelling, the birth of bandwidth takes center stage. In the 1980s, in the wake of the dismantling of the telecommunications juggernaut AT&T, three technological innovations changed the world: the emergence of the internet, mobile communications, and fiber-optic networks powered by lasers, all of which “ignited a revolution that would forever change how humankind worked, entertained and educated themselves, and how we communicated with one another.” The author focuses on the bandwidth industry, which experienced an extraordinary boom during the 1990s and an equally remarkable crash in the early 2000s, the “biggest Boom and Bust in human history,” per Caruso. As one of the founders of the Zayo Group, a major bandwidth infrastructure provider, the author is certainly in a “unique position” to tell this story, and his command of the material is impressive. He makes a compelling case for bandwidth being as important as electricity, as it “enables every aspect of our lives,” and he predicts that demand for it will only grow with the ascendancy of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, genomics, and robotics. This account can be excruciatingly granular—the author seems intent on compiling an encyclopedic record of every transaction he either contemplated or completed. While he succeeds in avoiding “self-serving exaggeration”—the author really did play an outsized part in the technology’s history—Caruso, the self-proclaimed “Bear of Bandwidth,” is hardly shy about touting his accomplishments. Still, this is an admirably comprehensive history of a technological revolution that has reshaped modern life.

A rigorous history as told by one who helped make it.