Rachel Warren <rachel@telco-bitch.com> quotes Bill Manning and replies: | > There was never any governmental sanction of the term or | > concept of tier anything associate with the NSFnet or its | > transition. | | And this is definately a good thing. It's also not true. NSF 93-52 did indeed specify precisely what type of backbone the funded regionals could connect to, and it required those distinguished backbones to interconnect in specific locations (the "priority" NAPs). The name "tier" wasn't used wrt eligible and ineligible backbones, but there was an explicit ranking of preference by the NSF that was based on specific interconnectivity, and that mapped very cleanly onto the then tier-1 backbones, with the exception of UUNET, which didn't play (and MFS's NAP wasn't even a "priority" one). | I don't think I would want to see my tax money being used by the | Department of Standards to define "Tier-1". Been there, done that, got the bruises (thanks pford & priscilla, I like the "I went to Danvers and all I got was a meeting behind my back" t-shirt souvenir). Sean.