One of a new breed of telecommunication companies engendered by the deregulation of the telephone industry in the early 1980s, MFS Communications began operating in 1988 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Kiewit Diversified Group Inc., which in turn was a wholly owned subsidiary of Peter Kiewit Sons' Inc., one of the largest construction and mining companies in the United States. Peter Kiewit Sons' entered the telecommunications business as part of a diversification strategy the company effected during the early 1980s, engaging in a series of acquisitions that led to the formation of Kiewit Holdings Group in 1986. From Kiewit Holdings Group evolved Kiewit Diversified Group, which oversaw the parent company's interests in telecommunications and incorporated MFS Communications' predecessor, Kiewit Communications Company, Inc., in 1987.

 

That is the official biography of the founding of MFS Communications. There is much more to the story than the official, formal tale. In this book we tell how Chicago Fiber Opric evolved into MFS Telecom, how fiber optic pioneer F. Scott Yeager along with data communications veterans from networking pioneer Tymnet joined Kiewit to found MFS Datanet, and how MFS Datanet worked with the early Private IP Network providers to end-run the NSFNet and create the modern Commercial Internet.

 

After the creation of the Commercial Internet, we show how the ideas of media-rich, streaming video and audio was championed by Scott and rejected by WorldCom and how it came into being under the ill-fated Enron Broadband Services.

 

This is the history of the Internet that is not well known today.

This is the story we tell in Securing the Network: F. Scott Yeager and the Rise of the Commercial Internet

 

Now available in Paperback and eBook from Amazon.