University of Minnesota Professor, Andrew Odlyzko, the man who first burst the Internet bubble now cuts through the special pleading for government giveaways to telcos. In business Odlyzko, who worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs, is best known as the fellow who disproved the "Internet is doubling every 120 days" myth used to fuel the tens of billions of dollars of investment that went down the drain in the 2000 Internet bubble.

A world class mathematician who played an important role in solving Fermat's Last Theorem, Odlyzko looked at the numbers and the capital required for networks and found the common assumptions didn't hold up. Innovation is always surrounded by hype it's a challenge to find the facts underneath.

Odlyzko spoke recently at the Columbia University School of Journalism Leonard Tow Center,