The Sprint NAP works.
It went operational in August 1994 with FDDI. A DEC gigaswitch was installed in April 1995. There are Nine ISPs connected.
The overiding concern was saturation of the FDDI ring. To deal with this, the Gigaswitch was installed and ISPs that exchange traffic amongst themselves at very high rates were moved to it (ANS,vBNS, Sprintlink, MCI). Others are on concentrators and include CERFNET, AGIS, APEX, Advantis and B3 Corporation. Eventually, all ISPs will be connected to the switch. ESNET has a pending connection.
There is currently a NMS machine on this ring. There is much concern about having a general purpose unix machine on that ring. Sprint plans to remove it soon.
Prior to the installation of the gigaswitch, there were clearly two NSPs that needed to be moved to the gigaswitch (Feb 23, 1995) as they were exchainging over 50% of the traffic between them. These two in turn exchanged with one other at a rate of 14%.
Plans -- operational procedures, better traffic analysis and ATM migration plan