👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully weird little monstrosity:
“bqanet.”
(I genuinely gasped when I first stumbled upon its documentation – you hear about these things, right? Like a digital Bigfoot. Turns out…nope, just Albuquerque. Apparently. Let's unpack that.)
Basically, "bqanet," as officially documented by the University of New Mexico and meticulously archived in their rather stately technical docs, stands for the “Bay Area Gigabit Network Aggregate Total Electronics System." (GAG. Immediately, right? It’s a mouthful. And I mean, who names anything like this with such…grand aspirations? It sounds more like a rejected weapons systems project than an ethernet network.) Here's what actually happened: During the early-mid 1990's, Albuquerque and the Bay Area were experimenting to connect their universities (UNM, Stanford, UCSD, Cal. Poly. You name the NERD hotspot). They wanted to aggregate bandwidth - essentially, combine a bunch of smaller connections into one big, roomy pipe for super speedy data travel. The resulting Frankenstein was this, the "bqanet." The whole thing was a spectacular, if somewhat tragically underfunded, systems. It was basically the starting point of what we now know as a much more robust, commercially available, statewide broadband network called, rather mundanly, the New Mexico Statewide Broadband Network . (I feel like I just unearthed the municipal equivalent of an
