OSPF and IS-IS: Choosing an IGP for Large-Scale Networks

Chapter 10. Extensibility

The 1980s and 1990s were the decades of entrepreneurship for the Internet. The World Wide Web changed the Internet from a small community of academics and technophiles into a huge worldwide marketplace. The carriers and ISPs focused on bandwidth, performance, and reliability. By the turn of the century, however, these infrastructure companies began changing their focus. Most offered similar levels of service, so the only way for them to compete with each other was through lower prices. Carriers and ISPs began looking for new service offerings to make up for the lost revenue of increasingly commoditized IP packet transport. Typical of the new services being offered were—and are—voice and video over IP, conference services, ...