The very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) came on line in April 1995 as part of a

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

(NSF) sponsored project to provide high-speed interconnection between NSF-sponsored

supercomputing A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

centers and select access points in the United States. The network was engineered and operated by MCI Telecommunications under a cooperative agreement with the NSF. NSF support was available to organizations that could demonstrate a need for very high speed networking capabilities and wished to connect to the vBNS or later to the

Abilene Network Abilene Network was a high-performance backbone network created by the Internet2 community in the late 1990s. In 2007 the Abilene Network was retired and the upgraded network became known as the "Internet2 Network". History One of the aims of th ...

, the high speed network operated by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID, which operates

Internet2 Internet2 is a not-for-profit United States computer network A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must ...

). By 1998, the vBNS had grown to connect more than 100 universities and research and engineering institutions via 12 national points of presence with

DS-3 Digital Signal 3 (DS3 or T3 line) is a digital signal level 3 T-carrier. The data rate for this type of signal is 44.736 Mbit/s (45 Mb). It can transport 28 DS1 level signals within its payload. It can transport 672 DS0 level channels ...

(45 Mbit/s), OC-3c (155 Mbit/s), and OC-12c (622 Mbit/s) links on an all OC-12c, a substantial engineering feat for that time. The vBNS installed one of the first ever production OC-48c (2.5 Gbit/s) IP links in February 1999, and went on to upgrade the entire backbone to OC-48c. In June 1999 MCI WorldCom introduced vBNS+ which allowed attachments to the vBNS network by organizations that were not approved by or receiving support from NSF. The vBNS pioneered the production deployment of many novel network technologies including

Asynchronous Transfer Mode Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a telecommunications standard defined by the American National Standards Institute and International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T, formerly CCITT) for digital trans ...

(ATM),

IP multicast IP multicast is a method of sending Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams to a group of interested receivers in a single transmission. It is the IP-specific form of multicast and is used for streaming media and other network applications. It uses speci ...

ing,

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

, and

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

. After the expiration of the NSF agreement, the vBNS largely transitioned to providing service to the government. Most universities and research centers migrated to the

educational backbone. In January 2006 MCI and

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

merged. The vBNS+ is now a service of

Verizon Business Verizon Business (formerly known as Verizon Enterprise Solutions) is a division of Verizon Communications based in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, that provides services and products for Verizon's business and government clients. It was formed as Ve ...

.vBNS+
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References

{{American research and education networks History of the Internet Academic computer network organizations Science and technology in the United States National Science Foundation