Copper Mountain's biggest buyers, Covad and NorthPoint, were DSL upstarts, and the company rose and fell with them. These new phone companies rented copper lines from the old monopolies and installed their own equipment in central offices. Copper Mountain made that equipment, the access concentrators that turned plain copper into broadband. When it went public in May 1999, its customers were the fastest-growing carriers of the moment, and its sales were rising quickly.

Paying by the Square Foot

Copper Mountain was founded in 1996. The bet was that the copper already running into every home and office could carry far more than voice. Its systems packed many DSL lines into a small space. That mattered in crowded central offices, where carriers paid by the square foot. Covad and NorthPoint, two of the largest new DSL carriers, were major buyers.

Sold for $10 Million

Copper Mountain priced its offering at $21 a share in May 1999, and the stock rose sharply through the following year. Then its customers began to fail. When the new carriers went bankrupt or slowed in 2000 and 2001, Copper Mountain's sales collapsed. In 2005 Tut Systems acquired the company in a stock deal valued at about $10 million. Tut wanted its engineers for internet television.

Cover: Alpine Scene, Gustave Doré. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a mountain (Copper Mountain).