MAE-East

MAE-East
Name	MAE-East
Type	Internet Exchange Point
Established	1992
Location	Ashburn, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Reston, Virginia; Vienna, Virginia
Founders	Metropolitan Area Ethernet Exchange consortium; Merit Network; NASA?
Technology	Ethernet, FDDI, Frame Relay, ATM
Notable	One of the first commercial Internet exchange points in the United States

MAE-East MAE-East was a pioneering Internet exchange point established in the early 1990s that played a central role in the evolution of the Internet backbone, interconnection, and peering ecosystem in the eastern United States. It connected major backbone providers, regional networks, research networks, and commercial carriers, influencing the practices of ARIN-era routing, the transition from NSFNET to commercial backbones, and the development of neutral colocation facilities such as Equinix and Telehouse America. The exchange served as a focal point for technical and business interactions among networks including MCI, Sprint, AT&T, UUNET, PSINet, and numerous regional Internet service providers.

History

MAE-East emerged amid the commercialization of the Internet and the decommissioning of NSFNET in the early 1990s. Operators and stakeholders from entities like Merit Network, CERFnet, ANSP, NSF-funded projects, and commercial carriers convened to create shared switching facilities and peering arrangements. Early deployments leveraged technologies such as FDDI and early Ethernet variants, reflecting contemporaneous deployments at exchanges like NAP of the Americas and peers of MAE-West. The exchange adapted to shifting traffic patterns driven by the growth of content providers including Yahoo!, AOL, Amazon and later heavy hitters such as Google and Facebook, prompting architectural upgrades and migrations to carrier-neutral colocation centers like PAIX and MAE-East-adjacent facilities.

MAE-East’s operational timeline intersected with key industry events: the privatization debates of the Internet Society era, the rise and fall of dot-com era carriers such as PSINet and Global Crossing, and regulatory discussions involving the FCC and antitrust concerns about interconnection. As traffic volumes exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the exchange’s limitations in handling scale and management led participants to seek alternatives, contributing to the growth of metropolitan exchanges and distributed peering fabrics.

Architecture and topology

The physical and logical topology of the exchange evolved from a small set of shared hubs into a distributed fabric spanning colocation sites in Ashburn, Virginia, Reston, Virginia, Vienna, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.. Early MAE-East deployments used shared-media FDDI rings and Ethernet concentrators, with routing facilitated by BGP-speaking routers from operators like MCI and UUNET. Traffic engineering practices common at the time—such as static route filtering and manual prefix coordination among networks like Sprint and AT&T—were necessary to manage the single-segment shared medium.

As technologies matured, participants incorporated technologies drawn from vendors like Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, migrating to switched fabrics and then to Ethernet VLANs and private interconnects. The topology reflected chokepoints typical of single-site exchanges: a flat layer-2 shared medium connecting many autonomous systems such as Level 3 Communications and regional Internet registries. The limitations prompted architectural moves toward redundant fabrics, distributed peering points, and ultimately the modern Internet Exchange Point (IXP) models exemplified by LINX and DE-CIX.

Operations and membership

Operational control combined volunteer and vendor-supported staff drawn from member networks, colocation operators, and neutral facility managers like Equinix and Telehouse. Membership included global carriers (AT&T, MCI, Sprint), early commercial ISPs (UUNET, PSINet), content distributors, academic backbones, and government-connected networks such as those associated with NASA research projects. Peering arrangements ranged from informal handshake peering among small providers to formal bilateral agreements and coordinated route filtering among Tier 1 networks.

Day-to-day operations required coordination on maintenance windows, address allocation interactions with ARIN and routing registries, and technical forums reminiscent of working groups at IETF meetings. The exchange’s membership dynamics mirrored industry consolidation trends, with mergers (for example, MCI WorldCom) and bankruptcies reshaping the list of participating autonomous systems. Operators managing peering LANs at MAE-East maintained session health, BGP filters, and operational contact lists to ensure resilience.

Peering policies and economics

Peering at the exchange spanned settlement-free peering, paid peering, and transit purchases. Major backbone operators such as Sprint, AT&T, and MCI negotiated bilateral peering policies based on traffic symmetry, geographic reach, and customer overlap, while smaller ISPs often accepted transit from larger carriers like UUNET and PSINet. The economics of MAE-East reflected broader tensions in peering policy debates documented in industry fora and regulatory inquiries involving entities like the FCC.

The exchange’s shared-medium nature reduced per-connection costs but introduced scaling and administrative overhead that influenced economic choices. As content distribution networks and large content providers emerged—companies such as Akamai Technologies and later Cloudflare—the value proposition for peering at MAE-East shifted, driving a move toward direct private interconnects, distributed IXPs, and regional peering exchanges that offered granular settlement and traffic-engineering controls.

Impact and legacy

MAE-East’s legacy is significant in the history of Internet interconnection: it helped normalize open peering practices, informed the design of later neutral IXPs, and provided a real-world laboratory for operational procedures later codified in IETF drafts and best-current-practice documents. The experiences of operators at MAE-East influenced the architectures of modern exchanges such as Equinix Internet Exchange, DE-CIX, and LINX, and contributed to the commercial strategies of backbone carriers like Level 3 Communications and NTT Communications.

Lessons from MAE-East regarding scalability, neutral colocation, and peering economics continue to inform network engineers, researchers at institutions like MIT and Stanford University, and policy discussions in forums including ICANN and regional Internet registries. The historical role of the exchange is preserved in technical retrospectives, oral histories by former engineers from UUNET, MCI, and PSINet, and in the evolution of metropolitan-area interconnection venues across the United States.

Category:Internet exchange points