The MAE (later, MAE-East) was the first non-governmental Internet Exchange Point (IXP). It began in 1992 with four locations in Washington, D.C., quickly extended to Vienna, Reston, and Ashburn, Virginia; and then subsequently to New York and Miami. 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 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. "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 (UUNET's backbone service), PSINet and Sprint's International Connections Management (ICM) network. MFS was the service provider offering metropolitan fiber, cross connects and switch ports for the ISPs to interconnect. By February 1993, the 10-Mbps metropolitan Ethernet connected the Sprint Point of presence ("PoP") (hosting Sprint's ICM and AlterNet), College Park PoP (AlterNet and NSFNet), MCI PoP (SURAnet), and WillTel PoP (PSINet). MAE-East then established a collocation facility at 1919 Gallows Road in Vienna, in a cinder-block room in the underground P1 parking garage.

MAE-East ATM was intended to be a successor to the FDDI.

See also

  • MAE-West
  • Internet Exchange Point (IXP)
  • Federal Internet Exchange (FIX)
  • Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX)
  • Network Access Point (NAP)

References

  • Photograph of 1919 Vienna parking garage, the original mae-east built in a parking garage in the 1990s.
  • . See Mae Services White Paper (2005) for historical information.
  • "How Equinix beat MAE-East," a blog written in 2009.