As NSFNET expanded through the late 1980s to become the backbone of academic networking in the United States, international links to Europe began forming that would eventually knit together the disparate regional networks into a single global internet. These connections replaced slower, more limited earlier links and dramatically increased the speed and reliability of transatlantic scientific data exchange.
By 1988 the US National Science Foundation's NSFNET had grown from a modest network connecting supercomputer centers into the backbone that was rapidly absorbing older networks like ARPANET's academic traffic. Its growth from 56 kbps to T1 lines (1.5 Mbps) that year represented a massive leap in capacity for the era.
European research institutions had been experimenting with their own networks, but the transatlantic links established through NSFNET-era cooperation allowed researchers on both continents to exchange data and email with unprecedented speed. This period of infrastructure-building, largely invisible to the public, quietly assembled the technical plumbing that would later carry the World Wide Web.
The engineers and administrators who negotiated these links, from institutions in the US, and partners in the UK, France, and elsewhere, were solving practical problems of bandwidth and routing protocol, not envisioning a global information revolution. Yet each new link narrowed the world, foreshadowing the moment just a few years later when Tim Berners-Lee's web would ride on exactly this kind of interconnected infrastructure.