off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth History

Wed Aug 11 19:10:05 UTC 2010

On Aug 11, 2010, at 1:13 PM, John Lee wrote:

> MCI bought MFS-Datanet because MCI had the customers and MFS-Datanet had all of the fiber running to key locations at the time and could drastically cut MCI's costs. UUNET "merged" with MCI and their traffic was put on this same network. MCI went belly up and Verizon bought the network.

Although not directly involved in the MCI Internet operations, I read all the announcements that came across the email when I worked at MCI from early 1993 to late 1998.

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.

--Chris