RE: History of private peering and exchanges?

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

>  > At some point, there started to be a business case for large
> >  providers to interconnect with bilateral private links as well as at
> >  exchanges.  When did such links first get used for commercial
> >  traffic? In the beginning, were they short-haul connections between
> >  cages in exchanges, or WAN links between major provider hubs?  I'm
> >  referring here only to interprovider links, not to transit customers.
Mark Borchers added,

> Well, if this is to be a comprehensive list, private interconnects
> predated the commercial Internet.  At OARnet in Ohio, we set up
> peering with CICNet in a facility near the Ohio Supercomputer Center
> in order to avoid long round trips.
Clearly, there's a need to broaden my scope!

I do want differentiate between good solid technical examples, such 
as yours for OARnet-CICNet, between examples where the suits had an 
economic motivation. The latter, I would assume, came later.

While I recognize I won't be able to publish the details of many 
NDA-covered commercial private peerings, it is my hope to identify 
when this practice began.  A side motivation for this particular 
point is to identify when commercial NDA considerations might have 
restricted the potential ability of routing registries to give 
reasonably accurate representations of topology and policy.

Yeah, yeah...if everyone DID put all their policies in an RR. Yet 
Another Issue.