Building Service Provider Networks

To be competitive, service providers cannot customize every installation but must simultaneously offer services that meet a wide range of perceived customer needs. This guide shows commercial service providers and equipment vendors how to build competitive service offerings for enterprise-specific needs.

• Provides vital technical and business guidance to the service provider marketplace
• Explains how to satisfy the customer's specific needs in data, voice, and/or video
• Enables readers to gain the upper hand in submitting the most competitive service network bids and service level guarantees to customers

Learn how to gain the edge of providing the most reliable service-level guarantees to customers

Network and service provider engineers are often faced with the difficult challenge of meeting a less-than-logical service need of a customer— and at the most reasonable price. In this book, Howard Berkowitz shows network and service providers how to customize their services to meet the specific requirements of the customer, whether for data, voice, or video. This detailed guide focuses on perceived customer requirements and then takes you through the necessary steps of deploying services accordingly by addressing the architecture, limitations, and capabilities of the existing telecommunications infrastructure.

Once the customer's requests have been translated into technical requirements, Berkowitz introduces you to policy specification language and offers an extensive discussion of obtaining and managing address space. With case studies scattered throughout the book illustrating the increasing amount of detail that each step brings to the technical specification, you will gain a better understanding of the transition from the world of conceptual requirements to the real facilities of telecommunications carriers. From there, you will learn:

* The physical and data link facilities at the increasingly complex provider edge

* Core transmission technologies

* Functionality of the Border Gateway Protocol, Version 4 (BGP-4), and its applicability to specific customer requirements

* The design of the carrier Point of Presence (POP)

* Revolutionary changes in scalability to the intraprovider core

* Interprovider connectivity and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and extending the network beyond a single provider

Wiley Computer Publishing. Timely. Practical. Reliable.

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HOWARD BERKOWITZ is a computer scientist and networking consultant and is very active in the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) and IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). His experience includes building and interconnecting to extremely large networks and designing router software. He is the author of several RFCs and has been presenting at trade shows since 1975. He is also the author of three other professional networking reference books.

Networking Council Books put technology into perspective for decision-makers who need an implementation strategy, a vendor and outsourcing strategy, and a product and design strategy. The series advisors are three of the most influential leaders of the networking community:

LYMAN CHAPIN-Chief Scientist at NextHop Technologies, former Chief Scientist at BBN, and founding trustee of the Internet Society

SCOTT BRADNER-Senior Consultant for Harvard University, Transport Area Director IETF, trustee of the Internet Society, and ISOC VP of Standards

VINTON CERF-Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology at MCI WorldCom, founding President of the Internet Society, and co-inventor of TCP/IP