[128535] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth History
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Benson Schliesser)
Wed Aug 11 18:21:07 2010
From: Benson Schliesser <bensons@queuefull.net>
In-Reply-To: <06D9EF2B-8D2E-4F7F-995C-4D7D3831FF57@gizmopartners.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:20:57 -0500
To: Chris Boyd <cboyd@gizmopartners.com>, NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>,
Andrew Odlyzko <odlyzko@umn.edu>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 11 Aug 10, at 2:10 PM, Chris Boyd wrote:
> My recollection is that Worldcom bought out MFS. UUnet was a later =
acquisition by the Worldcom monster (no, no biases here :-). While this =
was going on MCI was building and running what was called the BIPP =
(Basic IP Platform) internally. That product was at least reasonably =
successful, enough so that some gummint powers that be required =
divestiture of the BIPP from the company that would come out of the =
proposed acquisition of MCI by Worldcom. The regulators felt that =
Worldcom would have too large a share of the North American Internet =
traffic. The BIPP went with BT IIRC, and I think finally landed in =
Global Crossing's assets.
Actually, Cable & Wireless acquired the BIPP after regulators forced =
Worldcom to divest one of their networks. C&W developed a new network =
architecture as an evolution of BIPP called "N3", based on MPLS as an =
ATM replacement for TE. (Perhaps somebody that worked at C&W back then =
can comment on N3; I can't recall what it stood for.) After a few =
years, C&W reorganized their American operations into a separate entity, =
which subsequently went bankrupt. Savvis (my current employer) bought =
the assets out of bankruptcy court. We then upgraded the N3 network to =
support better QoS, higher capacity, etc, and call it the "ATN" =
(Application Transport Network). The current Savvis core network, =
AS3561, is thus the evolved offspring of the MCI Internet Services / =
Internet-MCI network.
Of course, before all of this, MCI built the network as a commercial =
Internet platform in parallel to their ARPA network. That's before my =
time, unfortunately, so I don't know many details. For instance I'm =
uncertain how the ASN has changed over the years. Anybody with more =
history and/or corrections would be appreciated.
Cheers,
-Benson
