Two years after the .com meltdown, wreckage continues to pile up on the information superhighway. Companies that set out to construct and manage the 21st century Internet – Exodus Communications, Global Crossing, 360Networks, and Winstar – now languish in Chapter 11. In all, network builders plowed some $30 billion into laying 90 million miles of fiber-optic cable. But the vast majority of those tiny glass strands lie dark, unused.

It turns out, in the end, that the New Economy turned out to be not so new. For the cycle we have just seen in fiber-optics – overbuilding, excess capacity, ruinous competition, falling prices, bankruptcy and consolidation – is eerily familiar. Indeed, a remarkably similar set of circumstances surrounded the introduction of the first information superhighway: the telegraph.

Author Tom Standage aptly refers to the telegraph as “the Victorian Internet.” Just as was the case with today’s fiber-optic network operators, revenues were slow in coming to early telegraph owners. In 1845, inventor Samuel Morse helped form the Magnetic Telegraph Co., which linked New York with Washington. In its first six months of operation, it tallied revenues of $413.44 against expenses of $3284.12. Like Internet builders, early telegraph pioneers found connecting the “last mile” to be a tough chore. By mid-1846, you could send a message on the Magnetic Telegraph Co’s line from Washington to Jersey City, New Jersey. But the message had to cross the Hudson – that mythic last mile – by boat. And throughout the 1840s and 1850s, lines popped up, only to be taken down and sold for scrap a few months later – much the same way as Winstar’s once well-capitalized networks were sold in bankruptcy court for pennies on the dollar.

The natural follow-on to the periods of overbuilding and failure is consolidation. That’s what is happening with the fiber-optic network companies. And that is precisely what happened in the maturing telegraph market. The New York & Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Co., formed in 1851, quickly snapped up 11 lines in five states in the Midwest. In 1856, it changed its name to Western Union.

By the mid-1860s, acquisitive Western Union was the undisputed master of the telegraph, which, with the advent of trans-Atlantic cables and automatic telegraphy, had emerged as a crucial business tool. In the late 1990s, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers boasted that the data on his desktop PC shed enormous light on the state of the New Economy. Just so, Western Union president William Orton told Congress in 1870 that the telegraph “is the nervous system of the commercial system. If you will sit down with me at my office for twenty minutes, I will show you what the condition of business is at any given time in any locality in the United States.”

Like the early telegraph companies, today’s fiber-optic network companies may have failed as investments. But both groups of entrepreneurs succeeded in laying down a highly useful infrastructure. By the 1870s, a farmer in a small town in Iowa could send a message to a distant relative in New York by using the telegraph. Today, a farmer in a small town Iowa can send a message to a distant relative in New York by using the Internet.

Traffic may travel on the information superhighway at the speed of light. The fundamentals of investing in information infrastructures change at a somewhat slower pace.

Daniel Gross is editor of Sternbusiness.