Advanced Network and Services

» see advanced.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

ANS sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot remember, because it was finished before Turkey had a consumer internet worth the name. What it settled is the shape of everything that came after, including my end of it. Somebody had to decide whether commercial traffic was allowed on the main road of the American internet, and the deciding got done inside a five year window that closed in 1995. ANS is the company that sat on both sides of that decision at once.

It was put together in september 1990 by the partners already running NSFNET: Merit Network out of Michigan, with IBM and MCI money behind it. The new organization was incorporated in New York with offices in Armonk and Poughkeepsie, and it was given a broader board than Merit had, which was the point. Allan Weis left IBM to be its first president. Douglas Van Houweling, who had chaired the Merit board, took the chair at ANS. Under the cooperative agreement Merit stayed responsible to the NSF for the backbone, and subcontracted most of the actual engineering to ANS.

The work landed in november 1991, when the T3 upgrade was completed and the result was named ANSNet. From that point the NSFNET Backbone Service, the road every American university was on, ran on infrastructure that a private nonprofit owned and operated. That is a small change on an org chart and an enormous one underneath.

~ the dossier ~

~ the backbone ~

ANSNet was 45 megabit circuits at a time when a well funded campus considered a T1 generous. It carried the research and education traffic of a country, and by 1992 the people running it had a second problem: their customers were getting broken into. The Morris worm was recent enough to be a live memory and the potential commercial users were nervous.

So ANS opened a security office in northern Virginia and built InterLock, which has a fair claim to being the first proxy-based firewall sold as a product rather than assembled out of router rules. It started as modifications to IBM's AIX and later ran on Solaris. If you ever wondered why Mosaic shipped with proxy settings in its configuration, this is the answer: the first browser had to work from behind the first firewalls, and a lot of those were ANS boxes.

~ the argument ~

In may 1991 ANS created a for-profit subsidiary called ANS CO+RE, for commercial plus research. Its entire reason to exist was that the nonprofit could not sell commercial access without endangering its own tax status, so the commercial traffic was routed through a company that could, over the same wires the government had paid to install.

NSF allowed it under conditions. The NSFNET Backbone Service could not be degraded, and CO+RE had to recover at least the average cost of the commercial traffic it carried. Any surplus went into an infrastructure pool to be handed out by a committee drawn from the wider networking community. The competing providers did not find that reassuring. Their argument was that a subsidized backbone had just been given a sales arm, and it produced a running fight that pulled in the NSF Inspector General, whose review is dated 23 march 1993, and eventually congressional hearings. The commercial internet exchange was built partly to route around the whole problem.

~ what it sold for ~

The NSFNET Backbone Service was decommissioned on 30 april 1995 and the architecture underneath the American internet changed to one where every road had an owner. ANS sold its networking business to America Online for $35 million. It became ANS Communications, Inc., an AOL subsidiary, and carried the dial-up traffic of the largest consumer online service on earth.

Then it moved again, and the second price is the interesting one. On 31 january 1998 AOL handed ANS to WorldCom and took CompuServe's consumer online service plus $175 million in cash, along with a five year contract that made WorldCom its largest network supplier. WorldCom's own filings recorded the ANS acquisition at approximately $500 million. The backbone AOL had bought for thirty five million dollars three years earlier was worth roughly fourteen times that when it changed hands again.

~ the afterlife ~

The nonprofit kept the money from the 1995 sale and turned into a grant-maker with a mission about advancing education through network technology. It funded ThinkQuest, the National Tele-Immersion Initiative and the IP Performance Metrics work that became an IETF working group, plus grants to Internet2 and the Internet Society. It ran competitions for students building things on the web and gave out more than a million dollars in prizes, which the Washington Post covered in november 1996.

When that organization actually ended is not settled anywhere. The Wikipedia article states in plain text that ANS closed down its operations in mid 2015 and has carried a citation-needed tag on that sentence since january 2017. The category tags at the bottom of the same page file it under 2008 and 2009 disestablishments. Its old address, advanced.org, does not resolve at all now. This grave dates the death at 1995, when it stopped being a network, and leaves the rest of the record showing its disagreement.

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