On 11 Aug 10, at 2:10 PM, Chris Boyd wrote:
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.
Actually, Cable & Wireless acquired the BIPP after regulators forced Worldcom to divest one of their networks. C&W developed a new network architecture as an evolution of BIPP called "N3", based on MPLS as an ATM replacement for TE. (Perhaps somebody that worked at C&W back then can comment on N3; I can't recall what it stood for.) After a few years, C&W reorganized their American operations into a separate entity, which subsequently went bankrupt. Savvis (my current employer) bought the assets out of bankruptcy court. We then upgraded the N3 network to support better QoS, higher capacity, etc, and call it the "ATN" (Application Transport Network). The current Savvis core network, AS3561, is thus the evolved offspring of the MCI Internet Services / Internet-MCI network. Of course, before all of this, MCI built the network as a commercial Internet platform in parallel to their ARPA network. That's before my time, unfortunately, so I don't know many details. For instance I'm uncertain how the ASN has changed over the years. Anybody with more history and/or corrections would be appreciated. Cheers, -Benson