Privatization and A New Network Architecture
The NSFNET Backbone Service was primarily used by academic and educational entities, and was a transitional network bridging the era of the ARPANET and CSNET into the modern Internet of today.
On April 30, 1995, the NSFNET Backbone Service had been successfully transitioned to a new architecture and the NSFNET backbone was decommissioned. At this point there were still NSFNET programs, but there was no longer an NSFNET network or network service.
After the transition, network traffic was carried on any of several commercial backbone networks, internetMCI, PSINet, SprintLink, ANSNet, and others. Traffic between networks was exchanged at four Network Access Points or NAPs. The NAPs were located in New York (actually New Jersey), Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Jose and run by Sprint, MFS Datanet, Ameritech, and Pacific Bell. The NAPs were the forerunners of modern Internet exchange points.
The former NSFNET regional networks could connect to any of the new backbone networks or directly to the NAPs, but in either case they would need to pay for their own connections. NSF provided some funding for the NAPs and interim funding to help the regional networks make the transition, but did not fund the new backbone networks directly.
To help ensure the stability of the Internet during and immediately after the transition from NSFNET, NSF conducted a solicitation to select a Routing Arbiter (RA) and ultimately made a joint award to the Merit Network and USC's Information Science Institute to act as the RA.
To continue its promotion of advanced networking technology the NSF conducted a solicitation to create a very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) that, like NSFNET before it, would focus on providing service to the research and education community. MCI won this award and created a 155 M-bit/sec (OC3c) and later a 622 M-bit/sec (OC12c) and 2.5 G-bit/sec (OC48c) ATM network to carry TCP/IP traffic primarily between the supercomputing centers and their users. NSF support was available to organizations that could demonstrate a need for very high speed networking capabilities and wished to connect to the vBNS or to the Abilene Network, the high speed network operated by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID, aka Internet2).
At the February 1994 regional techs meeting in San Diego, the group revised its charter to include a broader base of network service providers, and subsequently adopted North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) as its new name. Elise Gerich and Mark Knopper were the founders of NANOG and its first coordinators, followed by Bill Norton, Craig Labovitz, and Susan Harris.
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