Kees Neggers
lorenetworking
The Dutch network director behind the first European backbone, and behind the exchange that made Amsterdam a place traffic goes.
Ebone, which he led in 1991, was Europe's first cross-border backbone, and its founding idea is the one worth carrying: Open Exchanges - neutral places where any network could meet any other, rather than a hierarchy of who buys transit from whom. The exchange point entry for Glenn Ricart describes that room in the abstract; he is a large part of why Europe ended up with several, and why Amsterdam in particular became somewhere the world's traffic passes through rather than around. The list under his name is almost entirely institutions - RARE, TERENA, the RIPE registry, the Amsterdam exchange, a fibre consortium - which is the same shape as the other entries here whose work was making arrangements between organisations hold.
Also known as: neggers, surfnet, ebone, ams-ix
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame: managing director of SURFnet, the Dutch national research and education network, from 1988 until 2012; initiator and board member of RARE/TERENA, the RIPE NCC, the Internet Society, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange and GLIF; in 1991 he led the effort to create Ebone, the first European IP backbone, based on the concept of Open Exchanges
- Internet Hall of Fame: Neggers served RARE as treasurer, vice-president and president from 1986 to 1994 and was a major force behind the creation of TERENA, the RIPE NCC and the Amsterdam Internet Exchange; he co-founded GLIF in 2003 and chaired it until 2016