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| • Boston, anyone? |
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• Tutorial: How ISPs connect to the Internet: peering vs. transit
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| • Course 101 in Toronto April 20 sold out! New session scheduled for June 2-3-4 |
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• DVD 7: Understanding Wireless 2
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| Boston in May or June? |
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| A customer in the Boston area providing the full range of telecommunication services on a carrier-class network who has sent several employees to Course 101 over the past couple of years and "found it an effective way to begin their training" has four new hires he would like to send to Course 101 this spring - but travel costs are a problem. |
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| A solution is to schedule a public session in Boston. With a few more participants, we will be able to run the course. |
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| If you will attend a session of Course 101 in Boston in the next few months, please email us at boston@teracomtraining.com to let us know. That email address will be open until Friday April 3. If there is enough interest, we'll schedule a session. We'll be sure to serve tea! |
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| Course 101 in Toronto April 20 sold out! New session scheduled for June 2-3-4 |
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Course 101: Telecom, Datacom and Networking for Non-Engineering Professionals is our "core training" - an intensive three-day course designed for non-engineering professionals, to get you up to speed on virtually all aspects of telecom, datacom and networking, from fundamentals and jargon to the latest technologies. |
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The content, its order, timing and pacing have been tuned and refined over the course of sixteen years – and we constantly update it. It's clear that even during economic contractions, the smart money knows that Teracom's Course 101 is an investment that is repaid many times over... so much so, that the session scheduled for Toronto in April filled up and we had to schedule a new one!
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| Thousands of people from organizations including Cisco, Intel and Microsoft, the CIA, IRS, FAA, and FBI, all branches of US Armed Forces, Verizon, AT&T, TELUS and Qwest, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, TD Bank, Oneida Tableware, the Portland Trailblazers and hundreds of others who needed to be more effective in understanding and dealing with telecom and networking technology have benefited from this course. |
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Our goal is to bust the buzzwords, demystify the jargon and instill structured understanding... in plain English.
Register today for a scheduled session, or have us come to you to benefit from this career-enhancing course! |
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| DVD 7: Understanding Wireless 2 |
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| You may have noticed that our current DVD-video course library includes V1 - V5 (core training package), V6 (Understanding Wireless 1) and V8 - V10 (VoIP package)... but what happened to V7? It always been earmarked for Understanding Wireless 2, covering the next generation of cellular and wireless LANs. |
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| DVD 6 Understanding Wireless 1 is all about cellular mobile communications, starting with general principles and working through 1G analog, TDMA, GSM and finishing with both flavors of 3G: 1X and UMTS, both of which are CDMA technologies. |
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| DVD 7 Understanding Wireless 2 is all about technologies and services that use different radio technology called OFDM (December's tutorial). In practical terms, this is three topics: 4G cellular, also known as LTE, 802.11 Wireless LANs and 802.16 WiMax. |
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| Stay tuned for the release of DVD 7, expected late second quarter this year. |
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| Tutorial: How ISPs connect to the Internet: peering vs. transit |
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This discussion is covered in Course 101, Chapter 16 "Understanding the Internet",
and in more depth in
Course 110, Chapter 16 "IP as a Business: Carrier Networks, Competition and Interconnect" |
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| Originally, the only way to get on to the Internet was from a terminal connected to a computer at a university or research institute. The Internet was mostly circuits paid for by the taxpayers via the National Science Foundation. Today, commercial Internet access providers, called Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide the capability for anyone to access and communicate over on the Internet. These ISPs are for the most part business units of facilities-based carriers, i.e. telephone companies and cable companies. |
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| Such service providers have physical access circuits and circuit-terminating equipment on the customer side, plus routers, security and access control equipment to manage customer traffic. This is often organized with data centers in cities or regions, which are interconnected. This ensemble of interconnected routers controlled by an ISP is called an Autonomous System (AS). |
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| The Internet is a vast, unregulated collection of interconnected Autonomous Systems. The connections between ASs are not specified by a central authority or world government, but are implemented on a case-by-case basis by the operators of an AS for business reasons. The Internet is not free. It is not a public utility. It is a business. |
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| ISPs operating ASs will connect to competitors and content providers like Google to exchange traffic terminating on each other’s network (called peering), and will connect to larger organizations who will assure delivery of packets to other destinations (transit). The networks are physically connected at Internet Exchange (IX) centers such as Equinix Chicago at 350 E Cermak. These are buildings with equipment implementing network interconnection operated by a neutral third party. The ASs are responsible for paying for connectivity to the IX. |
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Course 101, page 16.09: Internet Service Providers
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| Peering is settlement-free, i.e. no money is exchanged. Transit is a commercial service that costs money. Larger ISPs charge smaller ISPs for transit services. The largest networks are sometimes called Tier-1 service providers... but “Tier-1” is not an officially defined term. Some claim that it means a network “close to the center of the Internet” or a network that does not pay for transit. However, there is no “center” to the Internet, and virtually all networks employ a mix of peering and transit agreements to connect to other networks… and the nature of such connections is non-disclosed confidential business information. A “Tier-1 network” might best be thought of as one operated by a very big facilities-based carrier that has presence in most or all IXs and sells transit services to smaller networks and ISPs. |
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| The ISPs build the access network and peering or transit connections to other networks, then charge the users for access. It’s a pyramid scheme. The end users end up paying for all. |
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In addition to access services, the ISP usually provides a Web server to host your website, a Domain Name Server, and an e-mail server.
Back in the Flintstones era when dial-up Internet access was first available, telcos were a bit slow to react, so for a while, companies like Netcom, MindSpring, Portal, Pipeline, iStar and others had their day in the sun. These organizations were resellers, leasing circuits from a carrier and reselling them to users under per-minute or per-month billing plans. |
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| The carriers eventually began competing with resellers, who for the most part went out of business, selling their customers to the carriers. For example, Netcom is now part of Earthlink, which is majority owned by Sprint. AOL and MSN are the biggest remaining reseller-type ISPs. For the most part, it is business units of the companies that own the cables coming into your home: the LEC and the cable TV company that are the dominant ISPs today. |
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| If you do choose to use a reseller-type ISP, particularly for a business or organization, questions regarding customer service, capacity and availability should be asked. Another is redundancy - do they have a single point of failure? Do they have multiple connections to different Tier-1 providers? What capacity are those connections? |
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This discussion is covered in Course 101, Chapter 16 "Understanding the Internet",
and in more depth in Course 110, Chapter 16 "IP as a Business: Carrier Networks, Competition and Interconnect" |
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| Here are a few links that you may find useful: |
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