NEARnet

~ the eulogy ~

it was built because darpa said out loud that the arpanet was coming down. the universities around boston did the arithmetic and found that seventy-one of the two hundred and fifty-eight host connections in the consortium were sitting on arpanet lines. that is a large fraction of a region's computing about to be switched off by a decision made somewhere else. so in 1988 they built their own.

nearnet stood for new england academic and research network. it was chartered by mit and harvard, with boston university as the third member of the founding group, and it operated as a membership organization rather than a company. by 1990 there were forty members. by the summer of 1993 there were more than two hundred, spread across all six new england states, having started with under ten inside greater boston. the mit announcement of that year dates the founding to 1989 rather than 1988, which is the sort of disagreement you get when a network has an organizing meeting and a switch-on date and nobody agrees which one counts.

what ran over it was not the web, which did not yet exist in any usable form. members reached the connection machine at thinking machines and pulled library catalogs from each other's institutions. the link out to the wider world went through the john von neumann center supercomputer site and into nsfnet, which is how a regional network in massachusetts touched the rest of the country.

i was four years old in 1988 and would not get a modem for another decade. the number that puts the distance in the right place is the backbone speed. nearnet's microwave links were doing ten megabits per second over cambridge in 1990. my first connection in turkey, in 1998, was a 14.4k modem, which is about seven hundred times slower than a link that had already been running for eight years by then. the internet was never distributed evenly and it was never distributed at the same time.

~ the dossier ~

~ ten megabits through the air ~

the microwave part is the reason this network deserves a stone rather than a line in a list. leased lines were the standing cost that killed regional networks, so nearnet extended its backbone with what was then called lan extension over microwave, supplied by a cambridge company called microwave bypass. it is generally credited as the first fixed wireless internet link anywhere.

the build was an analog 23 gigahertz licensed point-to-point microwave hop, modified to carry a ten megahertz baseband and mated to an 802.3 ethernet transceiver through a piece of hardware they called the etherwave transceiver. cisco routers sat on both ends and joined the segments. it moved ten megabits, which in 1990 was the top speed of the local network it was extending, so the air link was not a compromise. members too small or too far for a dish came in on t1 leased lines instead, and paid for them monthly.

the economics were the whole argument. a microwave dish is bought once. a leased line is rented until you stop existing. nearnet funded a meaningful part of its own operation by removing recurring transmission charges from its budget, which is a fairly ruthless piece of engineering for an academic consortium.

~ what came after ~

on 1 july 1993 bbn technology services incorporated, a wholly owned subsidiary formed for the purpose, took over running nearnet under contract to mit. the board that came with it was the region's own: james bruce for mit, stephen hall for harvard, john porter for boston university, and frank heart and alexander mckenzie for bbn. heart had run the team that built the arpanet's interface message processors. the network created because the arpanet was being dismantled ended up managed by the man who had built its routers.

bbn folded the operation into bbn planet in 1994 and the nearnet name stopped being used. gte bought bbn in 1997 and the isp became gte internetworking. when gte and bell atlantic merged into verizon in 2000, regulators made them spin the business out as genuity, which went bankrupt and was bought by level 3 in 2003.

that chain is the standard fate of every regional network built in the late eighties. they were assembled by universities to solve a problem no company would touch, and once the problem was solved they were bought for the customer list. the dishes over cambridge outlasted the name on the paperwork by a good margin.

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