As the era of the NSFnet Backbone Service came to a close in April 1995, the Internet community lost the ability to rely on what was the only set of publicly available statistics for a large national U.S. backbone. The transition to the new NSFnet program, with commercial operations providing both regional service as well as cross-service provider switching points (NAPs, also referred to as ( exchange points ), has virtually eliminated the public availability of statistics and analysis at the national level. In this article we cover three areas: