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The Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) was an early interexchange point that allowed the free exchange of TCP/IP traffic, including commercial traffic, between ISPs. It was an important initial effort toward creating the commercial Internet that we know today.
The goal of the CIX was to be an independent interconnection point with no U.S. government-defined "acceptable use policy" [1] on the traffic that could be exchanged; and just as critical, a "no-settlement" policy between the parties exchanging traffic. The no-settlement policy became a "given" during the modern era of the Internet, but was immensely controversial at the time.
The early history of the Internet was dominated by U.S. government agencies such as ARPA/DARPA through ARPANET, the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) through MILNET, the National Science Foundation (NSF) through CSNET and NSFNET, the NSF sponsored regional research and education networks, and a handful of national networks sponsored by various federal government agencies. The focus of this group was either military/government or research and education communications, especially support for the separately funded NSF supercomputing initiatives that started after Nobel laureate Ken Wilson's testimony to Congress in the 1980s.
In general these federally supported networks did not allow commercial traffic that was not in direct support of a federal agency's mission or in support of research and education. There were of course many organizations that wanted access to the Internet, but did not do work directly for or with federal agency or in support of research and education.
In 1988, the Federal Networking Council allowed the Corporation for National Research Initiatives CNRI to develop a gateway between the commercial MCI Mail. It became operational in 1989. That same year, many other commercial e-mail providers got permission to build and operate similar connections, leading to the interconnection of many, heretofore disconnected e-mail services to become linked via the Internet.
In 1991 the NSF allowed Advanced Network and Services (ANS), a non-profit company established by the Merit Network, IBM, and MCI to carry commercial traffic over the ANSNet backbone, the same infrastructure that carried traffic for the NSFNET Backbone Service. [2] NSF required ANS to (i) charge at least the average cost of carrying the commercial traffic, (ii) to set aside any revenue in excess of the cost of carrying the commercial traffic in an infrastructure pool that would be allocated to enhance and extend national and regional networking infrastructure and support, and (iii) to ensure that carrying commercial traffic did not diminish the NSFNET service.
Some saw allowing ANS CO+RE to carry commercial traffic as a good next step in the evolution of the Internet and as a way to bring about economies of scale that would reduce the cost of the Internet for everyone. Others were concerned by this approach to commercialization/privatization of the Internet and the manner in which ANS, IBM, and MCI received a perceived competitive advantage in leveraging federal research money to gain ground in fields in which other companies allegedly were more competitive. There was also disagreement about a settlement policy that seemed to require payments based on the amount of traffic exchanged.
The "com-priv" public mailing list at PSInet (com-priv@psi.com) was created to provide an open forum where the positives and negatives of approaches toward the commercialization of the Internet could be debated. The concept for the CIX was disclosed and debated on the com-priv list.
In mid-1991, meetings that led to the formation of the CIX were held in Reston, Virginia. The original signatories to the CIX agreement were PSINet, UUNET, and CERFnet. [3] [4]
While testing was originally done in the Washington, DC area, commercial operations began at a PSInet facility in Santa Clara, California in the Fall of 1991. [4] In April 1996, the CIX router moved to a more neutral site in Palo Alto, California, the Palo Alto Internet eXchange. [4]
The CIX was growing as more and more commercial ISPs connected. NSFNET traffic continued growing based on research and education usage. ANS CO+RE was carrying commercial traffic. But ANS refused to connect to the CIX and the CIX refused to purchase a connection to ANS. Thus it was not always possible for organizations connected to one provider to exchange traffic with other organizations connected via a different provider.
A "compromise" was needed in order to maintain a fully interconnected Internet. Mitch Kapor took over the CIX chairmanship from Marty Schoffstall and in June 1992 forged an agreement with ANS allowing ANS to connect to the CIX as a "trial" that they could leave with a moment's notice and without having to become a CIX member. [5] This compromise resolved things for a time, but later the CIX started to block access from regional networks that had not paid the $10,000 fee to become members of the CIX. [6]
This unfortunate state of affairs kept the networking community as a whole from fully implementing the true vision for the Internet—a worldwide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks allowing any connected site to communicate with any other connected site. These problems would not be fully resolved until a new network architecture was developed and the NSFNET Backbone Service was turned off in 1995.
The CIX established the business model for the settlement-free exchange of Internet traffic between Network Service Providers. From an engineering perspective this was an important precursor to the Internet interconnection architecture that followed such as the Metropolitan Area Ethernet (MAE) and the NSF sponsored Network Access Points (NAPs) that were established for the transition of NSFNET traffic to competing service providers that included Sprint, ANS, internetMCI, and others.
By 1995 the CIX was essentially superseded by events both commercial and technical, though the CIX router continued to operate until 2001 when the UUNET peering session was turned down. [7]
The hardware, a Cisco 7500 router, that had been the workhorse for most of the CIX's operational life (though not at its inception), together with papers and notes from the founding meetings (donated by Bill Schrader of PSINET) were acquired by the National Museum of American History in November 2005. [8]
As the role of CIX as an interexchange point diminished, it took on the role of an ISP trade association. CIX frequently lobbied the U.S. government and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). CIX's executive director was Barbara Dooley. [9] [10] CIX's lobbying efforts reflected the positions of its largest financial supporter, AT&T, regularly opposing the positions of the incumbent local bell operating companies. [11] [12] [13] CIX also appeared in other forums such as before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) [9] and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). [14] AT&T also supported a CIX spin off effort, the US ISP Association (USISPA) which was led by Sue Ashdown. Unlike other trade associations, CIX did not host a trade show, but instead appeared and solicited support at conferences like ISPCON.
AT&T, the long distance company, came under financial strain during the dot-com bust prior to being acquired by SBC, and its support for CIX diminished. In 2002, CIX was reorganized and took on the name of its spin off organization, the USISPA. [15] AT&T is now owned by SBC. While AT&T continues to support USIPSA, USISPA no longer takes policy stances at the FCC in opposition to SBC or other bell operating companies.
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the "down-stream" users of each network. Peering is settlement-free, also known as "bill-and-keep" or "sender keeps all", meaning that neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic; instead, each derives and retains revenue from its own customers.
The Internet backbone may be defined by the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers of the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network centers, as well as the Internet exchange points and network access points, that exchange Internet traffic between the countries, continents, and across the oceans. Internet service providers, often Tier 1 networks, participate in Internet backbone traffic by privately negotiated interconnection agreements, primarily governed by the principle of settlement-free peering.
A Tier 1 network is an Internet Protocol (IP) network that can reach every other network on the Internet solely via settlement-free interconnection. Tier 1 networks can exchange traffic with other Tier 1 networks without paying any fees for the exchange of traffic in either direction. In contrast, some Tier 2 networks and all Tier 3 networks must pay to transmit traffic on other networks.
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.
The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985 to 1995 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. The program created several nationwide backbone computer networks in support of these initiatives. Initially created to link researchers to the NSF-funded supercomputing centers, through further public funding and private industry partnerships it developed into a major part of the Internet backbone.
MCI Communications Corporation was a telecommunications company headquartered in Washington, D.C. that was at one point the second-largest long-distance provider in the United States.
UUNET, founded in 1987, was one of the first and largest commercial Internet service providers and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia. Today, UUNET is an internal brand of Verizon Business.
Internet exchange points are common grounds of IP networking, allowing participant Internet service providers (ISPs) to exchange data destined for their respective networks. IXPs are generally located at places with preexisting connections to multiple distinct networks, i.e., datacenters, and operate physical infrastructure (switches) to connect their participants. Organizationally, most IXPs are each independent not-for-profit associations of their constituent participating networks. The primary alternative to IXPs is private peering, where ISPs directly connect their networks to each other.
The MAE was the first Internet Exchange Point (IXP). It began in 1992 with four locations in Washington, D.C., quickly extended to Vienna, Reston, and Ashburn, Virginia; and then subsequently to New York and Miami. Its name stood for "Metropolitan Area Ethernet," and was subsequently backronymed to "Metropolitan Area Exchange, East" upon the establishment of MAE-West in 1994. The MAE predated the National Information Infrastructure plan, which called for the establishment of IXPs throughout the United States. Although it initially had no single central nexus, one eventually formed in the underground parking garage of an office building in Vienna, VA.
PSINet was an American internet service provider based in Northern Virginia. As one of the first commercial Internet service providers (ISPs), it was involved in the commercialization of the Internet until the company's bankruptcy in 2001 during the dot-com bubble and acquisition by Cogent Communications in 2002.
ATMnet was a regional Internet service provider (ISP) located in San Diego, California, United States. It was formed in 1994 and operated until its purchase by Verio in November 1997 as part of the latter's national roll-up of regional ISPs.
In Internet routing, the default-free zone (DFZ) is the collection of all Internet autonomous systems (AS) that do not require a default route to route a packet to any destination. Conceptually, DFZ routers have a "complete" Border Gateway Protocol table, sometimes referred to as the Internet routing table, global routing table or global BGP table. However, internet routing changes rapidly and the widespread use of route filtering ensures that no router has a complete view of all routes. Any routing table created would look different from the perspective of different routers, even if a stable view could be achieved.
The very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) came on line in April 1995 as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored project to provide high-speed interconnection between NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers and select access points in the United States. The network was engineered and operated by MCI Telecommunications under a cooperative agreement with the NSF.
DE-CIX is an operator of carrier- and data-center-neutral Internet Exchanges, with operations in Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. All DE-CIX activities and companies are brought together under the umbrella of the DE-CIX Group AG.
Merit Network, Inc., is a nonprofit member-governed organization providing high-performance computer networking and related services to educational, government, health care, and nonprofit organizations, primarily in Michigan. Created in 1966, Merit operates the longest running regional computer network in the United States.
Federal Internet Exchange (FIX) points were policy-based network peering points where U.S. federal agency networks, such as the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), NASA Science Network (NSN), Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and MILNET were interconnected.
Advanced Network and Services, Inc. (ANS) was a United States non-profit organization formed in September, 1990 by the NSFNET partners to run the network infrastructure for the soon to be upgraded NSFNET Backbone Service. ANS was incorporated in the State of New York and had offices in Armonk and Poughkeepsie, New York.
Susan Estrada is in the Internet Hall of Fame for founding CERFnet, one of the original regional IP networks, in 1988. Through her leadership and collaboration with PSINet and UUnet, Estrada helped form the interconnection enabling the first commercial Internet traffic via the Commercial Internet Exchange.
The California Education and Research Federation Network (CERFnet) is a mid-level network service provider based in California. It was one of the NSFNET regional networks and a co-founder of the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX).