in 1984, the national science foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the cornell center for advanced computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the united states. in 1985, a team from the national center for supercomputing applications began the development of nsfnet, a tcp/ip-based computer network that could connect to the arpanet, at the cornell center for advanced computing and the university of illinois at urbana-champaign. this high-speed network, unrestricted to academic users, became a backbone to which regional networks would be connected. initially a 56-kbit/s network, traffic on the network grew exponentially; the links were upgraded to 1.5 mbit/s t1s in 1988 and to 45 mbit/s in 1991. the nsfnet was a major milestone in the development of the internet and its rapid growth coincided with the development of the world wide web.