Cisco® ISP Essentials

Introduction

The Internet economy has played a significant part in the world economy since the mid 1990s. For many years prior, the Internet was the domain of U.S. academic research and defense internetworking, and a few entrepreneurs around the world who believed that a TCP/IP-based wide-area network (WAN) would be a viable alternative to the private wire networks that businesses were using to communicate with each other. The many ISP engineers who learned their skills in that period look on those early pioneering days at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s as something special. Work was invariably hard, and technology challenges were seemingly insurmountable when compared with the relative ease of use and configuration these days. But the sense ...