Internet backbone
The Internet backbone refers to the main "trunk" connections of the Internet. It is made up of a large collection of interconnected commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity data routes and core routers that carry data across the countries, continents and oceans of the world.
The resilience of the Internet is due its core architectural feature of storing as little as possible network state in the network elements and rather relying on the endpoints of communication to handle most of the processing to ensure data integrity, reliability, and authentication. In addition, the high level of redundancy of today's network links and sophisticated real-time routing protocols provide alternate paths of communications for load balancing and congestion avoidance.
History
The original Internet backbone was the ARPANET.
In 1986 the NSFNET backbone was established, later the US military broke off as a separate MILNET network, and the ARPANET was shut down.
The NSFNET was the principal Internet backbone starting in approximately 1988, bridging between the rather restrictive US DoD creation of the Internet, and its broad commercialization in the mid-1990s. Basically, the NSFNET opened up the Internet to the world. Some critical Internet technologies, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are a direct result of that period in Internet history.
With the decommissioning of the NSFNET Internet backbone network on April 30, 1995, the Internet now consists entirely of the various commercial ISPs and private networks (as well as inter-university networks), as connected at their peering points.
The term "Internet backbone" is now sometimes loosely used to refer to the inter-provider links and peering points. However, with the universal use of the BGP routing protocol, the Internet functions with no single central network at all.
With the occurrence of the dot-com bust in 2000, a number of major telecommunications carriers were threatened by bankruptcy, and some failed completely: for example, the EBONE network was decommissioned in its entirety. This served as a successful test of the level of fault-tolerance and redundancy of the Internet.
Overview
The Internet backbone consists of many different networks. Usually, the term is used to describe large networks that interconnect with each other and may have individual ISPs as clients. For example, a local ISP may provide service to individual homes or business using bandwidth that it purchases from another company with a backbone network. Backbone networks are usually commercial, educational, or government owned, such as military networks.
