Looking Ahead

The decommissioning of the NSFNET in 1995 marked the beginning of a new era. The Internet today is a playground for thousands of providers competing for market share. Research networks such as Abilene and vBNS are struggling to stay ahead of the curve, as an evolving multibillion-dollar industry continues to exceed all expectations. For many businesses and organizations, connecting their networks to the global Internet is no longer a luxury, but a requirement for staying competitive.

The structure of the contemporary Internet has implications for service providers and their customers in terms of access speed, reliability, and cost of use. Here are some of the questions organizations that want to connect to the Internet should ask:

  • Are potential providers (whether established or relatively new to the business) well versed in routing behaviors and architectures?

  • How much do customers of providers need to know and do with respect to routing architectures?

  • Do the customer and provider have a common definition of what constitutes a stable network?

  • Is the bandwidth of the access connection the only thing customers need to worry about in order to have the "faster" Internet connection?

The next chapter is intended to help ISPs and their customers evaluate these questions in a basic way. Later chapters go into the details of routing architecture.

Although interdomain routing has been around for more than a decade, it is still new to everybody, and it continues to evolve every day. The rest of this book builds upon this chapter's overview of the structure of the Internet in explaining and demonstrating current routing practices.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
3.231.222.84