[ih] History of Tier 1 Networks

[Andrew G. Malis]

Oliver,

Thanks for the great email. With regards to:

> As widely known, UUNET was Verizon's entry point into the Internet,
somehow.

The short history is that UUNET (AS 701) was purchased by MFS, which was
purchased by Worldcom, and Worldcom merged with MCI to form MCI Worldcom.
They built a huge HQ in Ashburn VA and moved AS 701 operations into it. MCI
Worldcom was in turn purchased by Verizon, and AS 701 became the Verizon
Business backbone in addition to being one of the major Internet backbones.
I was working for Verizon some time after the MCI purchase and visited the
Ashburn location quite a number of times.

Cheers,
Andy