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

Contents

1. What Is the Problem to Be Solved?
2. The Service Provider Landscape.
3. Services, Service Level Agreements, and Delivering Service.
4. Translating Service Definitions to Technical Requriements: Policies.
5. Administration, Addressing, and Naming.
6. Carrier Facilities: Getting Physical.
7. The Provider Edge: Layer 1, Layer 2, and the PSTN.
8. Transporting the Bits: The Sub-IP and Physical Intaprovider Care.
9. Basic BGP and the Customer Side of Exterior Routing.
10. Subscriber to provider, and Subscriber to Subscriber Edge: IP.
11. The Intraprovider Core: IP/MPLS.
12. The Provider-to-Provider Border.
13. VPNs and Related Services.