Hi Ray,
I'll work on a parody to your Mae West umbrella piece, later.
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MFS saw fit to make a point by using term "Ethernet." I've surmised that this is because they pioneered the first tariffed Ethernet, Token Ring, and FDDI offerings over the WAN, starting in Houston in the very early Nineties.
For the most part these were merely encapsulated protocols within the SONET envelope, but they offered an alternative to users since the carrier in this case was doing the kludging, and not the customers themselves. But most of this was still delivered over newly emerging SONET offerings and the older asynchronous T3s, at the time.
Calling their Internet Exchange an "Ethernet" drove the point home that they were players in a new 'net-cnetric motif, and not simply just another bell head operation devoted to SONET deployments. Of course, in the absence of dark fiber and dwdm, they needed to use SONET nonetheless to get in and out of the place, as they still very much do, today. I should also add that these MAEs are now overloaded to the point where newcomers cannot get in, and therefore the justification for addtional Internet exchange points in their proximities.
That's what I made of their use of the term Ethernet at the time, in any event.
Regards, Frank |
