Looking Ahead

The technical characteristics of an ISP's network have significant repercussions for the customer's service, including the quality of routing architecture. Because the customer might not have direct control over some of these characteristics, it is critical that the customer at least evaluate them and ensure that they will deliver the required connectivity and quality.

If you are an ISP customer whose demarcation point and collocation agreements stipulate that you are running and maintaining equipment on your premises—even if you do not own it outright—you are likely to be taking a significant hands-on role in developing the routing policies and architecture for your network. Even if you are not running and maintaining the equipment, there are decisions you will need to make and understand with respect to routing architecture.

The next chapter completes the foundational part of the book by discussing fundamentals of Internet addressing and address space depletion. After that groundwork has been established, Part II of this book provides an in-depth discussion of routing protocols.