Where the Internet Began

I got a few questions about the Before Times from my post yesterday – mostly asking about how the Internet finally materialized out of government funding and corporate phone companies…

Being a bit of a scholar of this sort of thing, back in 2004 I took the opportunity to go and visit a spot in Virginia where a lot of what we think of as the Internet came to be…


The Fredericksburg Virginia Sprint long distance POP (Point Of Presence) is an interesting piece of Internet history which centers around this rather unassuming set of utility boxes and the stickers on them…

The series of ownership stickers on that utility box is why we are here…

The ownership stickers changed as this box’s owners went from Lightnet (top) to WilTel (middle) to MCI (bottom).

Set your way back machine for 1983: CSX Corp and SNET (Southern New England Telephone) teamed up to create a new kind of private line service using the latest technology called fiber optics.

SNET provided the technical knowhow to make the network work, and CSX had the easements and property rights (being a major train company) to put it in. This new company was called, creatively, “LightNet” and it covered roughly 5000 miles and served more than 40 cities east of the Mississippi.

LightNet provided interstate private line telecommunications service to other common carriers such as US Sprint (heard of them?) and government agencies for voice, data, and video.

This same year LDDS (Long Distance Discount Service) is formed… More about them though in about a decade…

In 1985 another new company was formed, “WilTel”, who used decommissioned pipelines as conduits for buried fiber optic lines in operational easements. WilTel’s network covered 27 major cities west of the Mississippi… Places like Minneapolis; Omaha; Kansas City; St. Louis; Tulsa; Oklahoma City; Dallas; Houston; Denver; Salt Lake City; Los Angeles; and many others.

In September of 1987 LightNet and WilTel hammered out an interconnect agreement that tied the two networks together and created a coast-to-coast fiber network and laid the groundwork for a US spanning pure digital “backbone”.

Essentially the first inklings of a national “internet” that could be accessed by everyone, not just universities, were formed by these two companies back in 1987.

One could literally hang a sign on the fence that says “The Internet Started Here”.

Ok, so we move onwards.

  • 1989 WilTel buys LightNet in its entirety for something like $365 million.
  • 1990 WilTel and MCI announce a long term agreement to access each other’s fiber networks. This creates a network of over 50,000 system miles, or the biggest fiber based network in the world.
  • 1992 LDDS from a decade ago has become the fourth largest Long Distance carrier in the country by consuming anything it can fit into its corporate head.
  • 1994 LDDS acquires Dial-Net, renames to LDDS Communications, then acquires IDB-WorldCom.
  • 1995 LDDS Communications buys WilTel for $2.5 billion and becomes the provider for GTE, Ameritech, and SBC. The whole mess is renamed to “WorldCom”
  • 1996 MFS (yet another octopus telcom company) buys UUNET. In turn WorldCom buys MFS.
  • 1997 WorldCom buys CompuServe, buys MCI, buys Brooks Fiber, and renames to MCI-WorldCom.
  • 1998 MCI-WorldCom becomes WorldCom.
  • 1999 WorldCom tries to buy Sprint but is stopped when European and US governments wont allow it. 

This is probably the reason the Sprint box is on the other side of the pole from the LightNet / WilTel / MCI box…

The LightNet / WilTel / MCI box is on the other side of this.

You had one job, Sprint Guy…

And In 2002 WorldCom files a record bankruptcy case (3.8 billion) and renames back to MCI.


All of this happened around this little set of buildings next to some train tracks in Fredericksburg Virginia… Neat huh?

Listening to "Turn It Up" by The Alan Parsons Project