[ih] a few comments about Tier 1 networks, Frame Relay, Sandy Fraser, etc.

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Jumping into this interesting discussion with a few minor comments:


Vint asked about Sandy Fraser's data networks.  My recollection

is that Spidernet (or possibly just Spider) was created by Sandy,

but it was a local area network, and that it preceded Datakit, which

was for long distance links.  I don't know whether Spidernet was

ever commercialized, but it was used inside Bell Labs Research.

(I joined Bell Labs in 1975, and was located physically and

organizationally close to Sandy's group, but was not familiar with

their work, just heard some comments here and there in those early days.)


Apropos Frame Relay and other data networks, as several messages

on this list imply, they were instrumental in enabling the rapid

growth of the Internet.  The established telcos were not ignoring

data, they had a flourishing business selling Frame, ATM, and

private line services.  The issue is that they were expecting ATM

to take over, and leave Internet as an academic exercise that made

a brief appearance and then faded away.  (I was at some meeting with

high-level AT&T executives where they declared that the Internet

was just for porn, and would not listen to the Bell Labs researchers

who tried to tell them otherwise.  An amusing tidbit is that while

while ATM was declared to be the future, the internal AT&T network

that carried the all-important billing information, switched to

IP fairly early on.)  It took a long while for upper levels of

management to realize what network engineers knew fairly well,

namely that all those Frame, ATM, and private line networks were

increasingly carrying IP traffic.


For some estimates of traffic and capacity at the end of 1997, see

my paper with Kerry Coffman published in October 1998, "The size and

growth rate of the Internet,"


     https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/620/541


At that time, the voice network was far larger than any of the

data networks in traffic (but not capacity), and private lines

carried about as much data as the Internet.


Andrew