North American Network Operators Group
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Re: NAP History (was RE: The large ISPs and Peering)

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Thu Jul 26 16:37:51 2001 
On Thu, 26 July 2001, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
> At the time, the "center of the universe" was AS690, which was paid
> for by US taxpayer money and consequently had an AUP.  The NAPs were
> envisioned as a transitional mechanism away from that arrangement.  A
> lot of us at the time wondered aloud why NSF needed to provide a stamp
> of approval on US-based exchange points, as the FIXes, MAE East, and
> Milo's setup at NASA-Ames were already going concerns without any kind
> of endorsement from the NSF.  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.