If you need a primer on the afterlife of the dot.com boom, take a look at Fast Company, where Adam Penenberg reviews the long history of people who did not understand innovation and what has always happened after the first boom and bust.

He has numerous examples of people who said the phone was a toy and that horses were here to stay - just like your mother who said that she hated computers and would never understand them. We’ve been through that boom, which Penenberg likens to the railroad mania of the 19th century. Back then they were building lines from anywhere to just about everywhere else. Within a few years, of course, a huge number of start up railroads were bankrupt but some great family fortunes were built by bankers and railroaders who tied those bankrupt lines together into a national network.

And so too now, we’ve had the Global Crossing and all the others who lived for a few years off the predictions of Wall Street gurus that fiber-optic cable demand would double every six months. That led to massive overinvestment in cable but now we’ve got so much of it, we can finally look forward to the real revolution which is coming as all the cable finally gets to be used.

The biggest demand for broadband came a couple of years after the dot.com crash and Penenberg argues that’s the typical pattern. He’s right but if you’ve already read Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat you can skip this. You already know how important all that broadband capacity is.

And as the New York Times reports the Alcatel-Lucent buyout is likely to spark serious consolidations in the networking industry. That’s like what happened to railroads a century ago.