NAP History (was RE: The large ISPs and Peering)

Thu Jul 26 23:41:50 UTC 2001

Sean Donelan wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 26 July 2001, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
> > ....  Some companies (notably UUnet) thought
> > this was gratuitous enough that they never showed up at any NAPs.
> 
> If I recall, the objection was to using ATM for a exchange fabric, because
> several people thought it was less reliable at the time.  I thought UUNET
> was at the New York NAP (SPRINT Pennsauken, NJ) as well as the MAE-East
> alternate NAP, which used FDDI.
> 
> There were several ISPs at that time which only connected to FDDI/Gigaswitch
> based exchange points, and shunned the ATM exchange points.

As best as I remember, the NY NAP that ended up in NJ was originally 
supposed to be ATM, but they couldn't get it to work and were behind
schedule, so they "temporarily" deployed some FDDI.

ATM didn't work very well in Chicago, either....

I also vaguely recall that the 4th regional NAP was supposed to be in 
the South, and somebody in Texas was selected, but MAE-East shouldered 
them aside during the resolution process.  Much speculation about 
whether it was political rather than technical.

-- 
William Allen Simpson
    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32