991, the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) Association was formed by General Atomics, Performance Systems International (PSI), and UUNET Technologies to promote and provide a commercial Internet backbone service. Nevertheless, there remained intense pressure from non-NSF ISPs to open the network to all users. In 1994, a plan was put in place to reduce the NSF's role in the public Internet. The new structure comprises three parts: 1.Network Access Points (NAPs), where individual ISPs would interconnect. Although the NSF is only funding four such NAPs (Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.), several non-NSF NAPs are also in operation. 2.The very High Speed Backbone Network Service, a network interconnecting the NAPs and NSF-funded centers, operated by MCI. This network was installed in 1995 and operated at OC-3 (155.52 Mbps); it was completely upgraded to OC-12 (622.08 Mbps) in 1997. 3.The Routing Arbiter, to ensure adequate routing protocols for the Internet. In addition, NSF-funded ISPs were given five years of reduced funding to become commercially self-sufficient. This funding ended by 1998. In 1988, meanwhile, the DoD and most of the U.S. Government chose to adopt OSI protocols. TCP/IP was now viewed as an interim, proprietary solution since it ran only on limited hardware platforms and OSI products were only a couple of years away. The DoD mandated that all computer communications products would have to use OSI protocols by August 1990 and use of TCP/IP would be phased out. Subsequently, the U.S. Government OSI Profile (GOSIP) defined the set of protocols that would have to be supported by products sold to the federal government and TCP/IP was not included. Despite this mandate, development of TCP/IP continued during the late 1980s as the Internet grew. TCP/IP development had always been carried out in an open environment (although the size of this open community was small due to the small number of ARPA/NSF sites)...
