The MAE (later, MAE-East) was the first
Internet Exchange Point
Internet exchange points (IXes or IXPs) 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 ...
(IXP). It began in 1992 with four locations in
Washington, D.C., quickly extended to
Vienna
en, Viennese
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, postal_code_type = Postal code
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,
Reston, and
Ashburn, Virginia
Ashburn is a census-designated place (CDP) in Loudoun County, Virginia, United States. At the 2010 United States Census, its population was 43,511, up from 3,393 twenty years earlier. It is northwest of Washington, D.C., and part of the Washi ...
; and then subsequently to
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
and
Miami
Miami ( ), officially the City of Miami, known as "the 305", "The Magic City", and "Gateway to the Americas", is a coastal metropolis and the county seat of Miami-Dade County in South Florida, United States. With a population of 442,241 at ...
. 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 The National Information Infrastructure (NII) was the product of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. It was a telecommunications policy buzzword, which was popularized during the Clinton Administration under the leadership of Vice-President ...
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.
[
]
History
MAE-East was originally created in 1992, primarily by Scott Yeager of Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) and Rick Adams of UUNET. "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). The founding networks were AlterNet
AlterNet is a left-leaning online news outlet. It was launched in 1997 by the Independent Media Institute. In 2018, the website was acquired by owners of '' Raw Story''.
Coverage
Coverage is divided into several special sections related to progr ...
(UUNET's backbone service), PSINet and Sprint-ICM.[ See pages 70-76.] MFS was the service provider offering metropolitan fiber, cross connects and switch ports for the ISPs to interconnect.[ MAE-East was modeled after FIX East and Fix West.][ It was established as a Distributed Layer 2 exchange (shared 10-Mbps Ethernet over ]FOIRL
Classic Ethernet is a family of 10 Mbit/s Ethernet standards, which is the first generation of Ethernet standards. In 10BASE-X, the 10 represents its maximum throughput of 10 Mbit/s, BASE indicates its use of baseband transmission, and ...
). 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).[ The MAE did not have a multi-lateral peering policy or agreement, so each participant was responsible for independently negotiating their own bilateral peering agreements. There was also no mandatory peering requirement, so no ISP was required to peer with any other.][
In 1993, the ]National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...
awarded MFS/MAE-East a grant establishing it as one of the four original Network Access Points, or NAPs. MAE-East then established a collocation facility at 1919 Gallows Road in Vienna, in a cinder-block room in the underground P1 parking garage.[ The MAE upgraded to switched Ethernet and shared ]FDDI
Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) is a standard for data transmission in a local area network.
It uses optical fiber as its standard underlying physical medium, although it was also later specified to use copper cable, in which case it m ...
in Fall 1994, growing to seven DEC GigaSwitches.[ FDDI ports were available at 8100 Boone Blvd (in the MFS offices across the road from Gallows Road), 1919 Gallows Road, and a number of private customer ]POPs
Pops may refer to:
Name or nickname
* Pops, an informal term of address for a father or elder
* Pops (nickname), a list of people
* Pops (Muppet), a Muppets character
* Pops (Johnny Bravo), a character from the Cartoon Network animated television ...
.[ The GigaSwitch access was limited to 100 Mbps, suffered from ]head-of-line blocking
Head-of-line blocking (HOL blocking) in computer networking is a performance-limiting phenomenon that occurs when a line of packets is held up in a queue by a first packet. Examples include input buffered network switches, out-of-order delivery a ...
, reached scaling limits, and began to suffer outages.[ MAE-East FDDI was closed to new customers after 1998 and was shut down in February 2001.]
MAE-East ATM was intended to be a successor to the FDDI.[ MAE-East ATM was trialed in 1997 and went into production in 1998.][ 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.][ 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.][
By the time it closed down in 2009, many of the ISPs previously connected to MAE-East had moved to ]Equinix
Equinix, Inc. is an American multinational company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that specializes in Internet connection and data centers. The company is a leader in global colocation data center market share, with 240 data centers ...
Ashburn, a nearby Internet exchange built on gigabit Ethernet.
See also
* MAE-West
* Internet Exchange Point
Internet exchange points (IXes or IXPs) 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 ...
(IXP)
* Federal Internet Exchange (FIX)
* Commercial Internet eXchange
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 w ...
(CIX)
* Network Access Point
Internet exchange points (IXes or IXPs) are common grounds of Internet Protocol, IP networking, allowing participant Internet service provider, Internet service providers (ISPs) to exchange data destined for their respective networks. IXPs are ...
(NAP)
References
External links
*
Photograph of 1919 Vienna parking garage
the original mae-east built in a parking garage in the 1990s.
*{{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080430121452/http://www.mae.net/ , date=April 30, 2008 , title=mae.net . Se
Mae Services White Paper
(2005) for historical information.
Internet exchange points in the United States
History of the Internet
1992 establishments in the United States