History of private peering and exchanges?

Fri Feb 23 14:40:39 UTC 2001

There is some background and history available at:

    http://www.merit.edu/merit/archive/nsfnet/

While the vBNS connected the NAPs, very few organizations were 
allowed to use the vBNS and so most traffic exchanged at the NAPs was 
from commercial networks.

My (less than perfect) memory is that private exchanges between 
commercial backbones started to get serious in late 1995 and 1996 
when some NAPs for some periods of time were or were perceived to be 
bottlenecks. Some of the first were between internetMCI and other 
networks (SprintNet, uunet, ...).

You need to work the federal exchange points (FIXs) into your history 
and the MAEs.

Some other history collections:

    http://www.merit.edu/merit/history.html

   -Jeff Ogden
    Merit

At 8:39 AM -0500 2/23/01, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
>Between fading memories and NDA's, it can be hard to track how 
>things happened...but I'm trying to put together some timelines 
>about interprovider peering both through private peering (i.e., at 
>what point it became economic to meet other than through 
>ARPANET/NSFNET) and at exchanges.
>
>In the beginning, of course, there was the ARPANET.
>
>Then there was the NSFNET.  The NAPs were the first recognizable 
>exchange points, with AUPs.   NAPs were linked by VBNS.
>
>CIX came later, without the AUP restrictions of NSFNET.  My 
>impression is that bandwidth into it, at first, was quite limited.
>
>At some point, there started to be a business case for large 
>providers to interconnect with bilateral private links as well as at 
>exchanges.  When did such links first get used for commercial 
>traffic? In the beginning, were they short-haul connections between 
>cages in exchanges, or WAN links between major provider hubs?  I'm 
>referring here only to interprovider links, not to transit customers.
>
>Also in the timeline was the advent of true "local" or "metro" 
>exchanges.  Going through the archives, the first I see was Tucson. 
>Was that indeed the first cooperative exchange intended to reduce 
>backhaul?