You may have caught the nasty 509 error which hit this site yesterday.

Here it was no big deal. It was a technical problem. It was fixed.

But it did occur to me that, finally, the market for core bandwidth is starting to turn around and Web hosts are finding themselves in the position of restauranteurs. (Thus, we're repeating our picture of Italian restauranteur Mario Batali.)

You may now think about Parmesan Reggiano, some nice Balsamico, the cool breezes of Tuscany, an artisanal bread and a fine bottle of red. I'll explain.

It has taken five years to work off the bandwidth glut of the late 1990s. This was caused by DWDM, the discovery by engineers that light inside a fiber has colors, and capacity is bound only by the number of colors you can reliably detect. DWDM (it stands for Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, which may be why you usually see it referred to as DWDM) helped cause the Enron debacle, as explained in my book The Blankenhorn Effect.

In the last five years we saw an exponential increase in capacity, a collapse in building new fiber lines, and an arithmetic ramp-up in demand, so that only now is it becoming a real cost. (The cost is not yet real enough to justify a new fiber build, however.)

So, back to the restaurant analogy.

In a restaurant the idea is to sell food for more than it cost. The same is true for bandwidth with a Web host. Software and services make the difference between a high-class bandwidth restaurant and a dive, but the game remains the same.

The best customers to have are those who are big enough to demand a lot of bandwidth, but not so big that they can find alternatives to a host's bandwidth. (Google has gone into the dark fiber market.) The best Web hosts look for the best wholesale price they can find for backhaul, and try to re-sell it for as much as they can get.

The next turn in this screw is going to be interesting, by the way. That happens when demand finally justifies the building of a new line. Trouble is demand won't be wanting five or six new lines, just one. Who will get the concession?

Stay tuned.