MAE-East

MAE-East was an Internet Exchange Point spread across the east coast of the United States, with locations in Vienna, Virginia; Reston, Virginia; Ashburn, Virginia; New York, New York; and Miami, Florida. It was the eastern branch of the MCI Internet Exchange. Its name officially stood for "Metropolitan Area Exchange, East".

MAE-East was founded in the 1990s as one of the first large Internet peering exchanges and by 1997 it was estimated half the world's traffic passed through it. At the time it was located in the underground parking garage of an office building in Vienna, VA.

MAE-East was originally created in 1992, primarily by Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) and Rick Adams of UUNET. Steven Feldman an Internet architect recalls "A group of network providers in the Virginia area got together over beer one night and decided to connect their networks." The founding networks were AlterNet (UUNET's backbone service), PSINet and Sprint-ICM. MFS was the service provider offering metropolitan fiber, co-location facilities, cross connects and switch ports for the ISPs to interconnect. MAE-East was modeled after FIX East and Fix West. It was established as a Distributed Layer 2 exchange (shared 10-Mb Ethernet over DS3). By February 1993, the 10-Mb metropolitan ethernet-over-DS3 connected the Sprint POP (ICMnet and AlterNet), College Park POP (AlterNet and NSFNet), MCI POP (SURAnet), and WillTel POP (PSINet). It did not have a multi-lateral policy or have multi-lateral agreements, meaning it was a neutral exchange from the perspective that any ISP could join, all members were treated the same, but there was no requirement for any other members to peer with that ISP.

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