off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth History

Wed Aug 11 20:24:18 UTC 2010

On Aug 11, 2010, at 3:28 PM, Randy Whitney wrote:

> On 8/11/2010 3:10 PM, Chris Boyd wrote:
>> 
>> 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.

What happened to VBNS in all of this ?

Marshall

>> 
>> --Chris
> 
> Correct order of (in)digestion UUNet > MFS > Worldcom >< MCI > Verizon.
> 
> There were other multi-way acquisitions in-between as well (CNS, ANS, etc.)
> 
> -Randy.
> 
> 
> 