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Overview
Broadband in the Metro Area has proven to be telecom's one bright spot in 2001 – all the long haul backbone capacity in the world does you no good if you can't move your data through the Metro bottleneck. But service providers are wrestling with all manner of technology choices (SONET? DWDM? Ethernet? The coming 10Gig Ethernet?), and also face the challenge of easily and effectively accessing SANs and VPNs. Quality of service issues are crucial in recruiting and maintaining customersSteven Shepard lays bare the tricks and traps awaiting service providers in the metro area space, detailing the technological challenges and opportunities in his trademark lucid, humorous prose.Synopsis
GET SHEPARDED TO THE REAL DEAL ON MANs
Promising delivery of backbone-size bandwidth locally, where it's needed, the metro area glows with vast profit potential—and some of the most brazen hype and outrageously confusing counterclaims in communications. Now Steven Shepard puts things in focus. One of tech's top writers, Shepard brings you clarity, breadth, and depth of vision—and a winning wit—to make understanding metro area networking a pleasure.
You must read this book if—
* You intend to explore the most potentially lucrative area of telecom
*Unlimited bandwidth appeals to you
* You work in communications management or technology but are not thoroughly versed in metro area networking
* It's your job to open the MAN bottleneck and let the bandwidth flow
* Robust recovery, ease of local routing, and features such as QoS (Quality of Service), OSS (Operations Support Systems), and MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) could be useful bottleneck-breakers
* Orders of magnitude increases in bandwidth on a given strand of fiber are desirable
* The question of which technologies are most likely to succeed in MANs falls into your need-to-know category
A roadmap to Sonet, DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing), Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, 10 Gb Ethernet, Bluetooth, and other technologies in the MAN would be a valuable commodity
* Knowing how VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and SANs (Storage Area Networks) fit into Metro Area Networks sounds rewarding
* The words dynamic routing, bandwidth increase, and packet addressing send shivers down your spine
* You have a stake in business, and your business hasa stake in the Internet
* Investing in businesses crucial to the future of the Internet makes your wallet pocket tingle
Metro Area Networks are going to be major telecom profit centers for years to come. If you are a networking professional—an investor or a manager—you must absorb this cutting edge insight into MANs today—and tomorrow.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Read Only ReviewService providers have flooded the core transport network with optical fiber, and they still can’t get enough bandwidth to users at the edge. Why? One big reason: the metropolitan area bottleneck. Today’s new MAN technologies are intended to overcome that bottleneck. And since many of them are based on Ethernet, they’ll theoretically allow carriers to leverage user-friendly, low-cost technology for a change. (Ethernet-based standards replacing SONET/SDH -- who’d-a thunk it?)
As MANs grow in importance, however, service providers, carriers, and enterprises face tough challenges. They must learn how to streamline their “layer-cake” network architectures (nowadays, typically, multichannel DWDM for bandwidth; SONET/SDH above it for management; ATM above that for QoS; and IP at the top for multiprotocol support, with killer overhead everywhere). They must understand their new choices, deploy intelligently; and clearly understand how the new MAN technologies effect their service offerings.
There’s a lot riding on getting this right. Steven Shepard’s Metro Area Networking covers it all: technical and marketplace background, leading players, the latest standards work, new architectures that blur LANs and WANs, related technologies such as Resilient Packet Ring (RPR); QoS and operations support systems, and more. In one book: the whole future of MAN. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Steven Shepard makes the point that the metro market is the near future of networking. This book is a must-read for those involved in the telecommunications and networking industry -- including interested users who drive the requirements; the many vendors who provide the systems, components, and services that satisfy those requirements; and the investors who make all of it financially possible.
This book is very well written, with information that is easy to absorb. It describes the networking industry and explains how it applies to today's metropolitan customer demands. Shepard has organized his material into five parts that progress through information like layers of technology. Part 1 is dedicated to networking history, basics, and architecture. Part 2 looks at the metro area and the metro net. Part 3 really gets to the core with a discussion of enabling technologies. Part 4 takes a look at metro applications and how they fit in the metro environment. Part 5 takes a look at the players in the metro game -- from the component and system manufacturers to the service providers and their issues. Finally, there is an excellent acronym and abbreviation list in Appendix A and a glossary in Appendix B.
Metro Area Networking (MAN) is a new playing field. This informative, easy-to-read book provides important insight into the lucrative business possibilities of MANs. John Vacca
John Vacca, the former computer security official (CSO) for NASA's space station program (Freedom), has written 38 books about advanced storage, computer security, and aerospace technology.