UUNET

» see uu.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

uunet was us-only at the brand layer, never at the packet layer. anything i did from ankara on a 33.6 modem in '99, opening an irc network in austin or pulling a tarball off some us mirror, probably crossed a uunet router somewhere. nobody told you that at the time. the backbone was the part of the internet you only learned about when it broke.

the company was started in 1987 by rick adams, a system admin at the center for seismic studies in northern virginia. he wanted a way to feed usenet to commercial subscribers, since the official non-commercial usenet backbones did not allow it. the seed money was a loan from usenix, the unix user group. the corporate form was a non-profit, briefly. by 1990 it had flipped to for-profit and launched alternet, the first commercial ip backbone independent of nsfnet.

the late 90s were the boom. uunet was the largest us isp by traffic, by a wide margin, until psinet caught up. internet traffic was doubling every few months, which made any backbone operator look smart for a while. uunet was the network behind aol's dial-up pool and behind microsoft's first internet products. a lot of corporate vpns ran on it without knowing.

~ the case file ~

~ what it carried ~

the math on the late-90s internet ran through a small number of tier-1 backbones. uunet was one of them. the others were sprintlink and mci, with ans drifting in and out of the tier-1 list. some tier-2 names tried to make tier-1 stick after that. peering agreements between these networks determined whether your packets ever got to their destination. uunet sat in the middle of most of those deals.

in 1996 mfs communications bought uunet for $2 billion. mfs was itself acquired by worldcom that same year. worldcom kept buying things, including mci in 1998. somewhere in that cascade uunet became a wholesale-only business unit inside a holding company headed for one of the largest accounting frauds in us corporate history.

~ the day it died ~

worldcom blew up in 2002. $11 billion of inflated earnings, and bernie ebbers in handcuffs. the company eventually restructured as mci. uunet stayed on the balance sheet as a brand mostly because nobody could decide what to do with it. in 2005 mci finally dropped the uunet name from its wholesale offerings. verizon acquired mci in early 2006. the uunet asn kept routing traffic for years after the brand was gone.

~ what came after ~

rick adams cashed out somewhere around the mfs sale and became an angel investor in the dc-area internet community. he funded the perl foundation for a while and bought a wine ranch. the routers he had originally racked in northern virginia mostly stayed running, since the buildings they sat in were now part of verizon business and verizon business was running fiber for the entire eastern seaboard.

uunet does not have a wikipedia revival page, no anniversary writeups. it died the way most infrastructure dies, by being absorbed and renamed until the name stopped meaning anything to anyone except the people who used to work there.

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