[ih] History of Tier 1 Networks

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

See below:

On 28/04/2026 06:27, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> On 28-Apr-26 14:33, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond via Internet-history wrote:
>
> (at the end of his very, very informative message)
>
>> 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>
>
> Yes. I certainly saw people who found it very hard to accept reality
> which was so obvious by ~1993, even before the Web broke out of
> academia. People who had presumably been educated to apply critical
> thinking, but didn't. I recall a meeting in Brussels in those years
> where we were trying to persuade the monopoly operators to supply
> 34 Mbps international leased lines and they told us (the customers)
> that we couldn't possibly need that much capacity. They were almost
> literally leaving money lying on the table. They had no sense that
> we were all living on a literally exponential growth curve.
>
> But then there were also people like Peter Lothberg who had the
> accelerator firmly on the floor every day.

You're of course speaking of the Ebone (European Backbone) which is well 
explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBONE -- again a number of 
well determined individuals!

The number of naysayers re: Ebone was incredible. I cannot imagine how 
much opposition these guys faced in the first half of the nineties, 
before it grew exponentially. And then there was also DANTE - another 
project with huge administrative convincing needed ( 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DANTE ) - kudos to the project proposers.

Best,

Olivier