MAE-East

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MAE-East was an Internet Exchange Point spread across the east coast of the United States, with locations in Vienna, Virginia; Reston, Virginia; Ashburn, Virginia; New York, New York; and Miami, Florida. It was the eastern branch of the MCI Internet Exchange. Its name officially stood for "Metropolitan Area Exchange, East".[1]

MAE-East was founded in the 1990s as one of the first large Internet peering exchanges and by 1997 it was estimated half the world's traffic passed through it.[2] At the time it was located in the underground parking garage of an office building in Vienna, VA.[2]

History[]

MAE-East was originally created in 1992, primarily by Scott Yeager of Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) and Rick Adams of UUNET.[3][4] "A group of network providers in the Virginia area got together over beer one night and decided to connect their networks", said principal MAE-East architect Steven Feldman (MFS).[5][6] The founding networks were AlterNet (UUNET's backbone service), PSINet and Sprint-ICM.[7] MFS was the service provider offering metropolitan fiber, cross connects and switch ports for the ISPs to interconnect.[7] MAE-East was modeled after FIX East and Fix West.[7] It was established as a Distributed Layer 2 exchange (shared 10-Mbps Ethernet over FOIRL).[8] By February 1993, the 10-Mbps metropolitan Ethernet connected the Sprint POP (ICMnet and AlterNet), College Park POP (AlterNet and NSFNet), MCI POP (SURAnet), and WillTel POP (PSINet).[7] It did not have a multi-lateral policy or have multi-lateral agreements, meaning it was a neutral exchange from the perspective that any ISP could join, all members were treated the same, but there was no requirement for any other members to peer with that ISP.[7]

In 1993, the National Science Foundation awarded MFS/MAE-East a grant establishing it as one of the four original Network Access Points, or NAPs.[9] MAE-East then established a collocation facility at 1919 Gallows Road in Vienna, in a cinder-block room carved out of the underground P1 parking garage.[7] The MAE upgraded to switched Ethernet and shared FDDI in Fall 1994, growing to seven DEC GigaSwitches.[10][7] The FDDI architecture consisted of collocations at 8100 Boone Blvd (location of MFS offices across the road from Gallows Road), 1919 Gallows Road, and a number of private customer POPs.[7] The GigaSwitch access was limited to 100 Mbps, suffered from Head-of-Line Blocking, reached scaling limits, and was difficult to maintain (i.e., suffered outages).[7] MAE-East FDDI was closed to new customers after 1998 and was shut down in February 2001.[11]

MAE-East ATM was intended to be a successor to the FDDI.[7] MAE-East ATM was trialed in 1997 and went into production in 1998.[7] ATM allowed for higher-speed access (e.g. 155mbps-622mbps) and Private Virtual Connections (PVCs), which was conceived of as a solution to some problems in which a single connected network could spread to effect the entire exchange.[7] Frame Relay Access was added in 2002-2003 (155mbps-2.5gbps). In 2003, MAE-East ATM/Frame facilities were located at Boone Blvd, Sunrise Blvd, Tyco Road and Ashburn VA.[7]

By the time it closed down in 2009, many of the ISPs previously connected to MAE-East had moved to Equinix Ashburn, a nearby Internet exchange built on gigabit Ethernet.

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ "Who's MAE, and why is she so slow?" Archived 2012-07-16 at the Wayback Machine, Rob Robertson, 11 April 1997, accessed 3 July 2012
  2. ^ a b Brian Hayes (May 1997). "The Infrastructure of the Information Infrastructure". American Scientist. Archived from the original on February 14, 2005.
  3. ^ Gregory, Nathan (2016). Securing the Network: F. Scott Yeager and the Rise of the Commercial Internet. ISBN 9781520155586.
  4. ^ Ripley Hotch (October 1999). "Home Work Gets Easier (cover story)". Communication News. 36 (19): 12–14. Yeager is best known for his work to create the original Internet peering sites
  5. ^ James Bamford (2009). The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Random House. p. 187. ISBN 9780307279392. Retrieved February 27, 2014.
  6. ^ Gittlen, Sandra; Pappalardo, Denise (10 November 1997). "MAE-East mayday answered with a $10 million Band-Aid". Network World. 10 (45). Principal MAE architect Steve Feldman said WorldCom is not ready to commit to a single architecture, but is considering all the options.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Tom Bechly (June 23, 2004). "Enterprise Network Design". MCI. Archived from the original on August 13, 2014. Retrieved August 13, 2014. See pages 70-76.
  8. ^ Woodcock, Bill (July 2004). "A Brief History of Internet Exchanges" (PDF). Packet Clearing House.
  9. ^ Wolff, Stephen (2 March 1994). "NAP awards". com-priv mailing list. MERIT. Archived from the original on 2013-10-29.
  10. ^ Harris, Susan R.; Gerich, Elise (4 April 1996). "Retiring the NSFNET Backbone Service: Chronicling the End of an Era" (PDF). ConneXions. 10 (4).
  11. ^ Golding, Dan. "Peering Evolution" (PDF). NANOG. Retrieved 10 February 2003.

External links[]

"How Equinix beat MAE-East," a blog written in 2009.

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