national science foundation network (NSFnet)

The National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet) was established by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the early 1980s and served as a high-speed backbone for the North American Internet. The purpose was to connect research facilities equipped with supercomputers and to provide access to the powerful computers to a larger group of researchers.

NSFnet went into operation in 1986 with transmission speeds of 56 kbit/s; later, the transmission speed was increased to 1.5 Mbit/s. The main Internet connections that had existed until then were replaced by the NSFnet. In the early 1990s, the transmission speed of the NSF backbone was successively increased to 45 Mbit/s and later to 622 Mbit/s.

Since the mid-1990s, the NSFnet has no longer been in operation.