At 45 Mb/s, it’s the fastest openly available network for research and education.

In anticipation of the T-3 upgrade and the approaching end of the 5-year NSFNET cooperative agreement, in September 1990 Merit, IBM, and MCI formed Advanced Network and Services (ANS), a new non-profit corporation with a more broadly based Board of Directors than the Michigan-based Merit Network. Under its cooperative agreement with NSF, Merit remained ultimately responsible for the operation of NSFNET, but subcontracted much of the engineering and operations work to ANS. Then, in March 1991, SDSC became the first site to transmit electronic messages through the T-3 backbone.