Thanks for the correction! I was remembering one of the members of VIA (the student association who manages the IT at Ecole Centrale) giving me a tour of their infrastructure and boasting about fiber optic networks but I guess that was was after VideoLAN and the switch from Token Ring to Ethernet. Maybe something related to the Renater backbone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renater)

Anyway! Goods times :)