[ih] History of Tier 1 Networks

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

Dear James,

I never imagined this question being asked in the "Internet history", 
but here's my $0.02 based on some personal experiences at the time. 
Disclaimer: this is not the "definitive" history of the development of 
these companies, but based on some of my memories, some of which might 
be biased, and some faded, and I apologise for such potential inaccuracies.

My comments are interspersed in your text below.

On 24/04/2026 08:47, James Bensley via Internet-history wrote:
> [ ... ]
>
> The main question I want to understand is how the current set of Tier 1 networks came to be Tier 1 networks (why these networks and not a different set of networks?).
>
> To clarify my query; below is the list of Tier 1 networks which I think it could be said are derived from state funded telcos within a certain country:
>
> - AS701 Verizon / UUNET (from the USA via Bell Atlantic)

A brief history of UUNET is fairly summarised on the Wikipedia page: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUNET

What helped UUNET at its inception was that it took over most of the 
dial up UUCP traffic from !seismo! "Seismo" was a machine at the Centre 
for Seismic Studies in Northern Virginia and was operated by a gentleman 
named Rick Adams. By virtue of its location in the UUCP bang paths, 
seismo was one of the most important nodes in the UUCP world in the late 
80s.
As usual, at some point the "accountants" questioned why seismo was paid 
for by university funds to perform communications that had nothing to do 
with seismic studies. Rick Adams therefore started UUNET and transferred 
the traffic to that.

As usual, the initial "idea" was, let's do it as not-for-profit, but 
soon enough, it was clear that it was receiving a lot of longer distance 
dial up calls and leased lines were needed for some of the main UUNET 
backbone traffic (some using the NSFNET, some using other already 
existing networks that were typically US gov funded) - with email 
playing a small part but Usenet news making up a lot of traffic, with an 
explosion of newsgroups including some alt.binaries that were great 
bandwidth hoggers.

Soon enough UUNET launched a commercial venture, AlterNet and this 
changed the game. When faced with threats of disconnection from the 
NSFNET because of newly created Acceptable Use Policies, UUNET got with 
PSINET and CERFnet, both fearing disconnection, to create the first 
Commercial Internet Exchange - CIX. More info on this on: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Internet_eXchange

CIX was in California (I had assumed Washington DC but the Wiki page 
says otherwise?) but UUNET was on the East Coast.  Almost 
simultaneously, a sister to the Palo Alto Internet eXchange (PAIX) was 
created in Reston - Metropolitan Area Ethernet East (MAE-East) born in 
1992. (or my memory fades on this, perhaps MAE-East was there before 
PAIX) More on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East -- if someone 
remembers, it would be appreciated.

By then, most of the dial up UUCP traffic to UUNET had switched to 
leased lines which made MAE East big pretty quickly as a very reliable 
interconnection point between commercial and non commercial networks - 
the world's first large scale Internet Exchange Point (IXP). Each of 
these developments were not without the Cassandras predicting the 
"immediate death of the Internet". Thanks to dozens of really determined 
individuals, the whole thing held together and thrived, especially in 
the face of the WWW suddenly multiplying exploding traffic - and 
pornographers finding the Web to be an excellent way to make.money.fast. 
(pun intended)

As widely known, UUNET was Verizon's entry point into the Internet, 
somehow. The pioneer spirit was really that of Rick and his friends.

> - AS1299 Telia / Arelion (from Sweden)

No idea --- but I sense there's a link to the first Arpanet link to 
Sweden with SUNET and NorduNET academic networks picking up from there 
and creating a large online market for Internet in Sweden very early on. 
A fairly good history is explained on the relevant Wikipedia page: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet_in_Sweden

I can only imagine that Telia benefited from this early strong local market.

> - AS2914 NTT (from Japan)

NTT's entry in the Internet was already alluded to in that they 
purchased Verio Internet. Verio Internet was primarily a hosting 
provider starting in 1996. I knew them well as my company was one of 
their first customers. Just a small account with them, but they were 
incredibly reliable and their console for managing domain names, 
nameservers, web servers etc. was excellent.
In parallel, NTT was funding telecommunications research at Imperial 
College London with a Japanese research assistant being in the same lab 
as me and through him, I met with the then CEO of NTT Europe circa 
1994-5. At the time a group of us young students had a business plan for 
an ISP that would rival the UK's only large commercial ISP PIPEX. ( 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipex )

We presented a full business plan to NTT Europe that included the 
creating of one of Europe's first commercial Internet overlay.

But there was a snag. NTT Europe was a small operation mostly providing 
leased lines and telephone for financial services clients in Europe. NTT 
Japan was a national Telecom Company (TelCo) but focussed solely on 
National connectivity. The international connectivity market in Japan 
was run by KDD Corporation, a company created in the 1950s for Japan's 
international telecommunications. Thus, in a deeply conservative country 
with very strong social and business protocols, it was inconceivable 
that NTT could offer a telecommunication service that would provide 
publicly accessible international telecommunications. We had several 
meetings with a range of top level NTT officials, each with protocol, 
interpreters, etc. only to end with a refusal from NTT Europe to grant 
our small group £2M and invest no more than £5M into an Internet 
network. I remember the speech of the top man: "Internet is a hobbyist 
network. The risk is too high" -- and the risk-averse Japanese company 
ended up making a complete u-turn five years later after huge hubbub and 
restructuring in the late 90s as to why NTT is not a player at all in 
the Internet. They had to purchase Verio for $5.5 billion in August 2000.
Yes, 5 years to go from £5M to £5Bn - that's how much corporate mistakes 
cost.
Thus no entrepreneurial score for NTT, just very very deep pockets to 
the rescue.

> - AS3320 Deutsche Telekom (from Germany)
> - AS5511 France Telecom / Orange (from France)

These two are inter-related. Soon after our failure with NTT, in 1996 I 
read that France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Sprint Corporation had 
signed a joint venture named "Global One". Sprint had risen in the US to 
be a major player. They had plenty of clients on X.25 networks that they 
transferred to TCP-IP and had plenty of international telephone lines. 
So Sprint brought the Internet knowledge into the Global One Alliance. I 
immediately got a meeting with the top guys at France Telecom in Paris a 
stone's throw away from the Gare Montparnasse to push for an evolved 
version of the project. Sitting at the table were the top people from 
France Telecom, VTCOM their multimedia division, Transpac their data 
network. And things were not looking good: the VTCOM guys were defending 
the Minitel which was French and which people needed to pay for use. 
Transpac defended their track record in running a very stable large 
scale X.25 network and had some aversion to TCP-IP. Here again, the top 
guy's quote to remember was: "the Internet is a pipe dream for "les 
américains" - how will you ever make any money if the services you offer 
are free? You cannot make a penny giving services out for free. Oh and 
it's all in English, which will never work in France" - minitel was 
raising a lot of money through videotex services whereas you'd need to 
pay every time you dialled in, except for the free "annuaire" - 
directory enquiries. Still - they quietly launched "wanadoo" as a 
side-track, with a young team that they were predicting would suffer...
Turning to the topic of the Global One Alliance the folks scoffed at 
Sprint Communications (they are tiny) and at Deutsche Telekom (we'll 
show the Germans who's the boss).

With no outright recognised leader, the Global One Alliance failed 
pretty quickly. It is only through a generation change, with all of the 
people present in the room retiring 5-10 years later, that France 
Telecom finally understood the stakes and I suspect the same went of 
Deutsche Telekom - but they had to pay the high price of acquisition and 
development at full pace instead of being there from the early days and 
thus stupidly losing an early mover advantage. (Wanadoo did grow 
quickly, but it was much to their surprise.)


> - AS6453 Telstra (from Australia)

This one's an interesting one which I do not have first hand 
information, but the story I have heard on many an occasion (and that I 
never doubted) is that it all came to one determined telecom engineer 
whom you all know, who fought every bit of the way for Australia to have 
a satellite link to the Internet for the Australian Academic and 
Research Network (AARNet) after munnari.oz UUCP node was set up. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia

Again - the big Telcos at the time had no clue, but thankfully Telstra 
was born out of entrepreneurial pioneering.

> - AS6762 Telecom Italia Sparkle (from Italy)
> - AS6830 Liberty Global (comprised from the M&A of many European incumbents)
> - AS7018 AT&T (from the USA)
> - AS12956 Telxius / o2 (from Spain)

I have no story for any of the above.

>
> I think the following Tier 1s have their roots as being either fully privately funded or only minorly state funded (sometimes indirectly through M&As):
>
> - AS174 Cogent
> - AS3257 GTT
> - AS3491 PCCW / Console Connect
> - AS3356 Lumen / Colt

This is another personal story. In 1995, Colt (City of London Telecom) 
was a very small, new operator of telecommunication services, mostly 
telephone lines, in the City of London. In 1993 in the early days of UK 
telecommunication deregulation, it was awarded a license to compete with 
British Telecom and Cable and Wireless in voice and data communication. 
I met with the then CEO and leadership team of this small firm a few 
weeks after they had just signed up their 100 client in the City of 
London. They only dealt with corporate clients. At the time, the 
majority of their investment went into digging the roads around the City 
of London, laying cables and fibre to services new customers, one block 
at a time. We presented a plan for Internet Services for the Financial 
Industry in the City - which was firmly rejected two weeks later. The 
top guy's quote to remember was: "We asked our 100 clients about their 
interest in the Internet. Not a single client is interested. Not a 
single one! In fact some of the clients are telling us the Internet 
would be a security risk to their operations and they definitely do NOT 
want to get connected." - I could not convince him or any of his 
colleagues otherwise.
Again, it took a generation change and new management with much capital 
injection to make COLT what it is today. They needed a huge sum for a 
bailout agreement in 2001 and only then did they grow with different 
management. Thus, no pioneering spirit in them in 1995.


> I am told that some expanded into global connectivity due to a desire to provide better connectivity for their home market. What puzzles me is why some of these state funded telcos did this and some didn't.
>
> I'm told that NTT is one such example, which is now one of the biggest global IP carriers (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone wanted to improve connectivity and prices for the Japanese market), whereas SingTel (from Singapore) didn't; their monopoly in Singapore is still very strong today, but they've mainly staid within their “region”.

See above. I think that NTT thrived the moment it was accepted that they 
could provide international connectivity back home. If I remember 
correctly, NTT were, at the time (late 1990s) the largest company in the 
world by its real estate value so they had very deep pockets.

>   BT (from the UK) is another example. BT didn't go on to become a Tier 1 whereas most of it's Europe neighbours did.
>
> I'm guessing that the peering arrangements that lead to establishment of the Tier 1 tier where solidifying around the early 90's. At this time BT was operating Tymnet which later morphed in BT Global Services. I think they were very welled placed to enter into this realm, but didn't for some reason.

The story of BT is a very sad turn of events, and ultimately a huge 
waste of amazing people.
The UK was a pioneer of Internet Connectivity, thanks to many people but 
of course with the first link with Peter Kirstein at UCL playing a big 
role. The folks at the University of Kent at Canterbury channelled the 
UK's international UUCP traffic; JANET the UK Joint Academic Network, 
ran on X.25 and span the whole of the UK. There were multiple numbers of 
other networks, with the National Physics Lab (NPL) being a Pioneer. 
This is all explained in 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom

It all worked really well, even though there was a real struggle in the 
early 90s in regards to replacing X.25 with TCP-IP but that's another story.

Anyway, BT provided all of the leased lines at the time, across the 
country, plus a good microwave network. It engaged in cutting edge 
research in long distance fibre optic. Its labs in Martlesham Heath, 
which I visited in the early nineties as part of my PhD research, had 
incredible projects like optical routers and demonstrations of 
e-commerce and even an AI digital assistant that could make flight and 
hotel bookings. Wow!!!

But because of the telecom deregulation in the UK, it was blocked by the 
UK government from commercially developing any of these services. BT had 
to be "weakened" to let the competition gain ground for a "fair 
competition" - otherwise, in my opinion, BT would have probably crushed 
all competition out there.

It is only in around 1995 that it started offering individual Internet 
access, with a very clumsy initial marketing campaign that was just a 
set of internal documents as to how you could use the Internet. Yet, it 
quickly became one of the UK's largest ISPs, quickly passing Demon 
Internet, the independent ISP that had stated in the early 90s. By the 
late nineties, BT had fully understood the Internet stakes. I must admit 
that my company was a sub-contractor for BT Syncordia and we did lots of 
work on TCP-IP private networks for banks, government, transport, which 
required very high quality that BT could supply but that most of the 
other UK operators at the time were unable to reach.

Soon enough in 1997-8, BT was interested in purchasing MCI through a 
multi million dollar acquisition after it had a good relationship with 
MCI through the Concert Communications Strategic Alliance it had forged 
with MCI in 1994. This is another story that probably requires its own 
chapter but some others here are probably much better suited to tell it 
than me. I was on the BT side, when WorldCom bid $37 billion for MCI, a 
tragedy for us. The sum was deemed to be unreasonable thus BT dropped 
its bid. I used the word "tragedy" because as it happened, MCI WorldCom 
ended up having a massive $11 billion accounting fraud scandal (another 
story!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldCom_scandal ) and bankruptcy 
in 2002. It ended up being acquired by Verizon in 2005.

BT never really recovered from this slap in the face. Costs in preparing 
the buyout of MCI were signed off as a huge loss. The "accountants" took 
control. By then competition, helped by the UK Government deciding to 
allocate large corporate contracts to new entrants in the UK at the 
expense of BT (some new entrants not playing fair and ending up in their 
own huge corporate scandals - more side stories here). The last 
surviving branch of BT Syncordia, its UK operations, were shut down in a 
massive restructuring by the year 2000 with the loss of tens and tens of 
thousands of jobs overnight. I remember receiving a call from one of the 
top honchos asking me if I could hire him - and I had to admit to him 
that throughout these years, although we were doing so much work for 
them, we were a very very small company that could not afford him.
For a more complete history of the BT tragedy, read: 
https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/bt-group-plc

Ultimately, I blame the "accountants" and cost-cutters for screwing BT 
up. The best of the best people were all headed to the chopping board 
under a mountain of paperwork.

So that's how BT did not end up as a Tier 1 Internet Provider. They did 
have the pioneering spirit, but perhaps were over-ambitious and also 
unlucky.

I hope this provided a bit of entertaining reading. Some of it might be 
faded as it's all from memory.

I deliberately did not include names of some people because their 
failure to recognise the Internet's potential would be deeply 
embarrassing for them. <sigh>

Kindest regards,

Olivier