In the late 1990s through 2000, industry promoters
, and research companies such as KMI and RHK predicted vast increases in demand for communications bandwidth due to increased use of the Internet, and commercialization of various bandwidth-intensive consumer services, such as video on demand. Internet protocol data traffic was increasing exponentially, at a faster rate than integrated circuit complexity had increased under Moore's Law. From the bust of the dot-com bubble through 2006, however, the main trend in the industry has been consolidation of firms and offshoring of manufacturing to reduce costs. Recently, companies such as Verizon and AT&T have taken advantage of fiber-optic communications to deliver a variety of high-throughput data and broadband services to consumers' homes.