NAP - technical definition

(1) See network access protection.

(2) (Network Access Point) The first public Internet exchange points (IXPs). Established by the National Science Foundation in the early 1990s, they were set up to provide a standard way to exchange packets for commercial backbones. When the Net went commercial in 1995, four official NAPs were created. Three were run by the telephone companies in San Francisco, Chicago and Pennsauken, NJ, and the fourth was run by Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) in Washington, D.C., known as MAE-East (Metropolitan Area Exchange-East). Four more MAEs became de facto NAPs along with two federal exchanges and the Commercial Internet Exchange Association (see CIX).

From a Dozen to Hundreds
Since the first NAPs, hundreds of public exchange points were created around the world, which serve to interconnect all the backbone networks and provide on-ramps to smaller ISPs. See IXP.