A day in the life of the Internet: Vienna, Va.

VIENNA, VA., JANUARY 19 -- With a technical staff consisting of two ex-G.I.s and a former state cop, MAE East is ready for anything. Sixty percent of all European traffic? Bring it on. Forty percent of all U.S. traffic? Is that all you got?

''We've got plenty of bandwidth and we're ready to go,'' says former Army engineer Mike Carroll, lead technician for MAE East, the NAP operated by MCI Worldcom in a glass-fronted office building outside of Washington, D.C.

The name MAE, Metropolitan Area Ethernet, dates back to 1992 when MFS Communications Co., built the first network access point for ISPs. MCIWorldcom, which bought MFS, now operates eight MAEs in the U.S. MAEs East, West and Central are considered Tier 1 or national NAPs, while other five are Tier 2 or regional NAPs.

While the NAPs in France or Japan are designed to keep traffic from traveling outside of its borders, MAEs East and West handle serve as major gateways for international traffic.

In the U.S., where traffic is far heavier than in other countries, a large ISP would typically peer with other large ISPs at multiple NAPs across the country. This provides a better way to manage traffic, and it offers some insurance in case of an outage. It's also somewhat of a necessity, since NAPs owned by competing companies don't share traffic and MCIWorldcom doesn't allow ISPs to piggyback traffic from one NAP to another. For example, if an ISP wants to peer with other ISPs at MAE East and MAE West the ISP has to set up a separate connection at each location.

Carroll, technician Steve Sherfey, who also served in the Army, and Dave Vacher, who spent 10 years as a state trooper before making the career switch to networking, are sitting pretty these days when it comes to bandwidth.

With its FDDI network maxxing out, MCIWorldcom installed three Cisco Stratacom BPX switches each at MAE East and MAE West. The company is currently running concurrent networks, as it attempts to migrate existing customers over to ATM and to lure new customers to the service.

The NAP itself is a series of three rooms, each highly secure. ''It's a lot of boxes and a little bit of hum,'' says Ken Mitchell, who oversees the operation. ''It doesn't instill a whole lot of heartthrob.''

In the transmission room, behind a glass wall, tangles of cables aggregate traffic from customers like AT&T, Sprint, Cable and Wireless and Qwest into a single OC-192 or 10.56G bit/sec Sonet connection to the FDDI and ATM switches, says Mitchell.

In the co-location room, 80 cabinets painted an industrial yellow house the routers and other gear of ISPs. The third room houses the switches. The ATM boxes, which are trunked together by OC-12 connections, pack 48 DS-3 ports in a console the size of a dorm refrigerator. The ATM switches are about half the size of the FDDI switches, which are dwarfed by the largest appliance in the room, a giant air conditioning unit.

On the day of our visit, traffic at MAE East peaked at 2.1G bit/sec at around 5 p.m, which is a huge amount of traffic considering the Tokyo NAP peaks at 320M bit/sec.and the London NAP typically tops out at 400M bit/sec.

Read the stories of individual NAPs by clicking on their city name below:

MAE East overview

Forum: The state of the 'Net
Discuss it with Dan Lasater, director of broadband applications and MAE architect for MCI WorldCom.