off-topic: summary on Internet traffic growth History

Wed Aug 11 19:28:21 UTC 2010

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.
>
> --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.