In a series of syndicated columns in daily newspapers in December, Cramer pounded the communications infrastructure industry on both the OEM and semiconductor levels, saying that he was going to stay sour on hardware stocks in telecom for three to five years out.

Cramer sees built-in speed bumps on the way to recovery. In the first half of 2001, we only had to worry about the death of alternative service providers. By the end of the year, many incumbent service providers-from a winnowed-down AT&T to a floundering Qwest-looked highly questionable. And with no public-network infrastructure being upgraded, where do folks like Nortel and Cisco turn to find signs of spring? Cramer concluded in one column that, "I can write off Tellabs and Ciena and Juniper forever if I have to, even though I once loved them."

It is true that the investment meltdown in telecom infrastructure, which approached $500 billion overall, represented a greater loss of equity than anything seen in e-commerce in the 1990s, or real estate following the 1929 crash. This was the worst comparative equity collapse of the past century. So it's not enough to look at the so-called fiber bandwidth glut in deployed optical fiber, or the impact of departed managed service providers and ISPs putting the infrastructure carriers out of business. One must also factor in junk bonds, vendor financing, hedge funds and all the funny money fueling the 1999-2000 telecom boom.

Yet, Cramer is forgetting something as surely as Walter Hewlett ignores a full side of Compaq Computer's business in bashing the HP-Compaq merger: It's in the servers, stupid. Internet use by individuals or corporations has not declined during the recession, though its rates of uptick have slowed. As IT purchases lag, corporate server farms get overburdened, as B-to-B and B-to-C traffic increases.

That means new equipment to solve old network bottlenecks needs to be put in place, first in enterprise networks, then in edge access, and then in metro.

The next phase in buildout must begin this year-in short, halting steps. By ignoring this needed removal of Net bottlenecks, Cramer is as shortsighted as the Hewlett heir who thinks Compaq is only about PCs. Besides, in his column bashing telecoms, Cramer defends his own management of hedge funds. Are you going to let a hedge-fund manager tell you that your hardware business is toast?