19. Selection of Carriers and Vendors

We are ready to select key vendors for the network. These are important decisions, with many ramifications. In some ways, it would have been nice to have done this earlier in the process; however, it is often impractical to finalize this vendor-selection process until the design has been refined to a considerable degree. The reason for this is that the selection is to a significant degree a price/performance comparison; it is not meaningful to make the comparison independent of an understanding of what components and services will be used and how they will be used.

This chapter provides some brief background on the current market for telecommunications services and equipment. The industry is undergoing rapid ...

Get Designing Wide Area Networks and Internetworks: A Practical Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.