I provisioned, at minimum, a dedicated T1 to each of these ISPs, and to multiple geographic metropolitan areas for redundant, diverse access to their localized customer bases:
AT&T, MCI, Sprint, WorldCom, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, France Télécom, ImagiNET, Deutsche Telekom, KPN, HiNet, Telia, Telefónica, Telstra, NTT, Japan Telecom, KDD, IDC, ITJ, Telekom Malaysia, SingTel, Korea Telecom, SK Telecom, Embratel, TelMex, Rostelecom, Bezeq, NetVision, EasyLink, CERNET, UUNET, BBN, GTE
The footprint of this deployment reached greater than 99% of the world’s internet-connected population, collapsing global geography so they were now exactly one hop from each other on our Tier-0 global network.
The benefit of the network, which I described and branded as Merchant Transport, was an IPLC CBR network that made cross-border, sub-300ms roundtrip SSL session completion reliably repeatable at operational scale to ≈99% of all internet accessible users.
Consider the structural landscape of the era: during 1996-2000, approximately 65% of all internet users worldwide resided in the USA alone, while the remaining 35% comprised the rest of the world.
Digital Island peered with seven domestic, US-centric ISPs to capture that 65%, and twenty-four rest of world ISPs for the remaining 34% of internet users. We unified both hemispheres under a single, deterministic transport fabric.
No other ISP nor Tier-1 carrier offered such network services before Digital Island, nor concurrently until the sale of Digital Island in 2001 to Cable & Wireless.