Broadband packet switching: a personal perspective

The author's personal perspective on the development of broadband packet switching from 1980 to 1995 is presented in the context of the Internet's development during the same timeframe. The development of today's Internet is also placed into a 40-year perspective of a mature deployment of a national broadband packet infrastructure. A conclusion that today's Internet represents about 0.1 percent of the deployment of a national petabit per second capacity broadband packet network, and that we have moved roughly halfway through the development and deployment timeline is developed. Along the way, the author gives his personal perspective on the development of, and the researchers who developed, technologies like packet voice, Ethernet bridging, ATM, the CNRI gigabit testbeds, and local ATM. The article discusses the efforts at transitioning the Internet from academic to commercial service