Foolish: The Internet Protocol, IP, does not provide any guarantees. There is no guarantee that a packet will be transmitted, when that might happen, how often that might happen, or how long it will take to reach its destination. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkes. In IP, there is even no way for a device to which a packet is proposed to be transmitted to report back whether it got the packet, sent it onward or what. Nothing. This is called a connectionless, unreliable network service. 
 
Here’s the foolish part: if we are to use an IP network for real-time, delay- and loss-sensitive applications like phone calls and watching television, implementing Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms to guarantee transmission characteristics is essential… otherwise, there is no way to guarantee quality of the reconstructed signal at the destination. Television pictures would freeze, then jump forward, sometimes have block distortion effects and other artifacts. Clicks, pops, muting, breaking up and similar effects would be heard on phone calls. Saying that we should not take measures to prevent this is foolish. All phone calls and television will happen over IP in the future. 
 
Guaranteeing transmission characteristics is easy if there is no traffic on the network. The difficulty happens when there is contention, either for the use of an outgoing circuit at a network device, or contention for the use of the processor in a network device… and this contention is going to have to be resolved in favor of real-time, delay- and loss-sensitive applications like phone calls and watching television to the detriment of applications that are less sensitive to delay and packet loss like web page downloads, email and file transfers. 
 
Here’s the ignorant part: IP network service providers are not operating IP networks as such. They are operating MPLS networks. MPLS is the IP world’s implementation of virtual circuits, where we define classes of traffic and pre-determine routes and relative priorities for the classes. A class of traffic is a flow of packets going from the same place to the same place and should experience the same transmission characteristics. We establish multiple classes going from the same place, to the same place but each with a different specified transmission characteristic. This way, the class is a number to look up in a table in an intermediate routing node that will yield the address of the next-hop device and the priority level of the packet. 
 
At the entrance to the MPLS network, the first MPLS router, called the ingress device, analyzes the packet to determine what (among other things) application is being carried in the packet (voice, video, music, email, web page, etc.) to determine class it belongs to, and when it decides, pastes a label on the front of the IP packet with a number indicating the class. Intermediate Label Switching Routers in the network do not examine the IP address, they use the number in the label to lookup the routing decision and the priority level of the packet. This is how Quality of Service is implemented on packet networks.

It’s ignorant for these supposedly-well-informed net-neutrality advocates to talk about “IP” networks when they are actually MPLS networks, and one of the main reasons for the network operator having implemented MPLS was to be able to prioritize packets based on the application being carried inside them, to be able to guarantee transmission characteristics for phone calls and watching television!  MPLS as the Quality of Service (QoS) technology to implement the exact opposite of “net neutrality” is already in place on all commercial IP networks.  It was used to manage the bandwidth for the download of the article you are reading right now!  Too late.

More ignorance: thinking that the Internet is a public utility.  It ain’t.  It’s a business.  read more here
 
“Disingenuous” is usually defined as being not straightforward or candid; giving a false appearance of frankness; being insincere. Here’s the disingenuous part: the application that is being “throttled” or traffic that is being “shaped” or “slowed” (the correct term is “policed”) is piracy. Theft. In most places, illegal activity. Downloading illegal copies of copyrighted material. Stealing. 
 
The category of application being policed is peer-to-peer file sharing. Examples of this kind of application include bittorrent and limewire. These applications are used 99.999% of the time to download illegally-made copies of Hollywood movies, music of all kinds from Beethoven to Eminem, training videos, software, ebooks, audio books and other copyrighted works without paying the author or publisher. Take a look at one of the bittorrent sites like piratebay dot org and click “browse torrents” to see for yourself. Yes, the advocates can describe how bittorrent was designed for the legitimate delivery of software, and trot out one example of a legitimate use… but this is definitely a case where the exception proves the rule. 99.999% of the use is theft. 
 
In English common law there is a maxim: you can’t come to court with dirty hands; in other words, you can’t ask for justice if you yourself are obviously breaking the rules. The people whose traffic is being policed have filthy dirty hands. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. 

ALL “NET NEUTRALITY” ARTICLES:

Net Neutrality - Foolish, ignorant or disingenuous?

Net Neutrality II: If the power company allowed this, your electrical bill would double

Net neutrality - not. VideoTutorial on Service Level Agreements, traffic shaping and traffic policing

Is the Internet a Public Utility?
 
 
“NET NEUTRALITY” AND IP NETWORKING TECHNICAL RESOURCES:

the most comprehensive discussion of this topic is in this course:
Course 110 Understanding IP Telecom: IP, VoIP and MPLS for Non-Engineers,
  Chapter 14. Quality of Service in the IP World:  NET NON -NEUTRALITY

Course 101 Telecom, Datacom and Networking for Non-Engineers,
  Chapter 3-3 “Bandwidth-On-Demand: Packet Network Services” and following

Video Course DVD-4 “Understanding Networking 1″
Part 3 WANs - Bandwidth On Demand: Packet Network Services

Telecom 101 Textbook
 Chapter 18 Bandwidth on Demand

Designed for non-engineers, this training course will give you the solid, vendor-independent foundation knowledge necessary to deal with IP telecom network projects and IP voice and data applications with confidence. 

If you want to know the answers to these questions, or you should know the answer to these questions, but don’t, this is the course for you: 
 
When an organization like AT&T or TELUS says it “has an MPLS network” and sells “MPLS services”,
- What exactly does that mean?
- Just what is an MPLS service anyway? What does it do? Who uses it? What for?
- Can you tell me two different ways MPLS service is different than Internet service?
- What benefit does that bring to the customer?
- Does it cost more? Better yet, is it costed the same way as Internet service?
- How do you connect to MPLS service?
- What is the technology and business environment for MPLS service going to in 2015?
 
I think you’ll agree that knowledge set is career-enhancing knowledge. We often tell people “if you want a guaranteed job, be an expert in MPLS”. Here’s a great place to start! 

And this is only one part of this intensive, three-day leadership and technology development course!
You will also learn the workings of SIP and softswitches; the nuts-and-bolts of packetized voice and its protocols; Layer 2, VLANs and 10 Mb/s - 40 Gb/s Ethernet services; IP routing; the ISP business and more.

In three days, you’ll get up to speed, demystify jargon and buzzwords, fill the gaps, understand the technologies, the underlying ideas and how it all fits together… knowledge you can’t get from trade magazines or salespeople. 

This investment will be repaid many times over, eliminating frustration at buzzword-filled meetings, increasing your efficiency, and helping ensure you make the right choices. IP, VoIP and MPLS is an essential knowledge set going forward in telecommunications. 

This professional training course will give you the solid, vendor-independent foundation necessary to deal with IP telecom network projects and IP voice and data applications with confidence. 

Get this career-enhancing knowledge today! more info

BOOT CAMP consists of two courses back-to-back to make a full week: Telecom, Datacom and Networking for Non-Engineers (Course 101) and Understanding Voice over IP (Course 130). You get a 15% discount on both courses, saving $350. how to get the discount

This is an easy sell with management. Your increased efficiency, productivity and informed decision-making will repay the cost of the training many times over. Plus, surveys show that managers prefer late August as the best time of year for training: vacations are over and new projects are not underway, so it’s an ideal time to slot in training.

Seize this opportunity to really get up to speed and fill in the gaps. You’ll have an advantage over the competition with this career-enhancing knowledge of telecom, datacom, networking and VoIP. You’ll be a lot more effective and a lot less frustrated, understanding the ensemble of communications technologies, the jargon, buzzwords and how it all works together. register now

  ]]> http://blog.teracomtraining.com/boot-camp-washington-dc-week-of-august-26-carpe-diem/feed http://blog.teracomtraining.com/attend-course-110-may-18-20-and-get-50-off-course-101-june-1-3-transferable http://blog.teracomtraining.com/attend-course-110-may-18-20-and-get-50-off-course-101-june-1-3-transferable#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 21:02:34 +0000 admin http://blog.teracomtraining.com/?p=28 Course 110: IP, VoIP and MPLS for Non-Engineers is the second stage of our “core training”, covering virtually all aspects of IP networks, Voice over IP, VPNs, IP security, SIP, MPLS, carrier services, connecting to carriers and more. This totally up-to-date course will give you the solid, vendor-independent foundation knowledge necessary to deal with IP network projects and IP voice and data applications with confidence.
Blowout Special! Attend Course 110 in Santa Clara May 18-20 and
get Course 101 in Santa Clara June 1-3 at half price! A $695 value!
Even better: it’s transferable. We’ll give you a coupon anyone can use!   Getting up to speed on IP is essential career- and productivity-enhancing knowledge that you can’t afford to be without if you want to go forward in the telecom business… and this one-time offer makes it easier than ever to benefit from Teracom’s world-renowned training. Hurry! This offer ends very soon and will not be repeated.
  ]]> http://blog.teracomtraining.com/attend-course-110-may-18-20-and-get-50-off-course-101-june-1-3-transferable/feed http://blog.teracomtraining.com/special-free-textbook http://blog.teracomtraining.com/special-free-textbook#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 21:01:32 +0000 admin http://blog.teracomtraining.com/?p=27 Course 101: Telecom, Datacom and Networking for Non-Engineers 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. The content, its order, timing and pacing have been tuned and refined over the course of sixteen years – and we constantly update it.
Special!
Attend Course 101 in Santa Clara June 1-3 and get a Telecom 101 textbook free!
Act now, as this is a once-only offer that will not be repeated this season.   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.   Our goal is to bust the buzzwords, demystify the jargon and instill structured understanding… in plain English. Register today! You will receive your free textbook at the course. This is in addition to the 384-page course materials.
  ]]> http://blog.teracomtraining.com/special-free-textbook/feed http://blog.teracomtraining.com/how-isps-connect-to-the-internet-peering-vs-transit http://blog.teracomtraining.com/how-isps-connect-to-the-internet-peering-vs-transit#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:45:06 +0000 Eric Coll http://blog.teracomtraining.com/?p=26 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”

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.

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).

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.

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.

Course 101, page 16.09: Internet Service Providers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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”

Paying the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) for tariffed services, either switched access or dedicated lines, to connect the last mile from a competitive carrier’s Point of Presence (POP) to the competitive carrier’s customer started to become widespread in 1984.

Subsequent legislation and regulatory decisions unbundled the ILEC’s physical access network from the ILEC’s services provided on that network. This enabled competitive carriers to lease just the ILEC’s physical cabling to the customer instead of paying for a tariffed service. If the ILEC is providing copper wires without electricity on them, i.e. not attached to a CO switch line card, this is called a dry circuit. A fiber not attached to a line card is called dark fiber.

In addition to being required to lease dry copper or dark fiber to their competitor, the ILEC is required to build colocation facilities in its COs. These are rooms, often with separate entrance doors, where the competitive carrier can locate their own circuit-terminating equipment like modems and line cards, and network equipment like switches, multiplexers and routers.

When a company collocates equipment in the CO and connects it to the ILEC’s cabling, the competitive carrier is said to be acting as a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC).

Going even further, the competitive carrier can simply lay their own fiber from their POP to their large customers and bypass the ILEC altogether.

Mature Competitive Carrier Network: Regional Rings, POPs and MANs

A current model for a competitive carrier’s network, depicted above, now includes the POPs in cities connected together to form a “long distance” backbone, plus one or more Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) built out from the POP in each city.

To ensure high availability in any kind of network, more than one physical connection is required to every station, on different cables, to protect against cut lines. It turns out that the cheapest way to do this is to connect them neighbor-to-neighbor-to-neighbor to form a ring.

The competitive carrier’s POPs in cities are connected to form regional rings, which are interconnected at multiple places to implement national communications.

Within a metropolitan area, a competitive carrier will install or lease fiber to connect their POP to the ILEC’s toll center, to the ILEC’s COs where they have collocations, and to their large customers. These physical locations are also connected neighbor-to-neighbor to form a ring for redundancy; the ring is the MAN.

From Course 101: Telecom, Datacom and Networking for Non-Engineers, rev 2008-10 pages 3.14 and 3.15

After more than 20 years, it appears that an almost universally-accepted standard for mobile radio may finally be implemented, bringing to an end the standards war between carriers that deployed TDMA/GSM for second generation and carriers that deployed CDMA for second generation. Those two factions continued the standards war for the third generation (UMTS and 1X respectively); but now carriers from both of the factions are supporting the GSM/UMTS faction’s Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) release 8, known as Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network Long Term Evolution (LTE).

LTE appears to have triumphed over alternatives 802.16 WiMax and Qualcomm’s Ultra Mobile Broadband. LTE promises co-existence with other standards, allowing in theory handoffs between cells supporting LTE and cells supporting UMTS, GSM/GPRS, 2G CDMA, CDMA-MC or 1XEV-DO.

LTE’s spectrum-sharing method, called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), is different than that of previous generations, providing flexible and efficient use of different carrier bandwidths along with tolerance to noise and multipath interference. Bit rates are on the order of 100 Mb/s when a 20 MHz carrier is employed. As with all claims for wireless bit rates, these are peak burst rates under ideal conditions with one user per cell.

Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna designs can increase the bitrate using spatial multiplexing, which is basically gluing several antennas together. Interestingly, OFDM is also used for 802.11 Wi-Fi and DSL.

OFDM is not like 3G CDMA. On the downlink, many 15-kHz subcarriers are defined within the radio band. The bit stream is used to modulate the subcarriers individually; in the most complex implementation, each of hundreds of subcarriers is used to transmit 6 bits at a time with QAM-64. These are all added together to produce a transmittable waveform… and this is calculated in one step with highly-complex digital signal processing called an Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform. The figure below illustrates an example using the very simplest type of modulation of the subcarriers, binary Amplitude Shift Keying, i.e. tones that are either on or off to represent 1 and 0.

LTE: Orthogonal Frequency-Divison Multiplexing (OFDM) - transmitter

At the receiver, a Fourier transform performs the reverse process to yield the original bit stream. This happens at the same rate as the subcarrier spacing, 15,000 times per second, which has the result of making the harmonics of all of the other subcarriers cancel out during the detection of a given subcarrier at the receiver, hence the term orthogonal.

Prior to modulation, Forward Error Correction is implemented, adding redundancy to the bit stream so that correct decisions can be made based on maximum likelihood in the presence of impairments like noise and fading. The bit stream is also shuffled or interleaved, re-arranging the order of the bits in time so that burst errors are no longer sequential errors.

On the uplink, LTE uses a pre-coded version of OFDM called Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) to avoid the need for expensive and inefficient power amplifiers, which would increase handset cost and shorten battery life.

One of the reasons for the 3G standards war was the requirement to pay American company Qualcomm royalties on patents for several techniques necessary for a mobile CDMA system. LTE is not CDMA, so those royalties are avoided… but it turns out that Qualcomm filed or has purchased many patents that underpin LTE. Additionally, since LTE phones will have to be backwards-compatible with 3G CDMA networks, Qualcomm sees “no impact” on patent royalty revenue for the first ten years of LTE development according to COO Sanjay Jha.

The 3GPP Technical Report 25.913 contains the detailed requirements specification for LTE. The system architecture, in Technical Specifications 36.300 and 36.401, is simplified to two principal network elements: evolved Network Base stations (eNBs) and Evolved Packet Cores (EPCs). eNBs communicate with EPCs, with each other and with user equipment.

LTE is slated to become part of IMT-2000, the 3G “standard”, so in a strict standards committee environment, LTE would be called a 3G technology. An updated version, 3GPP release 10, which might be called LTE-Advanced, is expected to be submitted to the IMT-Advanced standards committee, which would cause those standards committee members to declare it officially a 4G standard. Everyone else will refer to LTE as 4G from the start.

From Course 101: Telecom, Datacom and Networking for Non-Engineers, rev 2008-10 page 6.19
and from the upcoming new DVD 7 “Understanding Wireless 2″ scheduled for release in 2009.

A switch, in its simplest form, is a device that causes communications to happen from one point to one other particular point, often when there are multiple “other” points to choose from.

A traditional Central Office (CO) telephone switch might be called a “hard” switch, since it has physical line cards that terminate loops. The switching software running on the computer which is the CO switch directs traffic between a line card and a trunk or between two line cards during a phone call.

The term soft switch is used to mean a computer running switching software that does not have telephone line cards – the communications are instead directed to the correct destination by routers routing packets, a software function.

As there are different approaches for the architecture – centralized vs. distributed switching, for example – and many, many vendors of products, there are many implementation variations and a plethora of jargon and buzzwords in this area. Soft switches are deployed by carriers to provide network-based services, and by end-user business customers to do it themselves.

Different standards for call setup define terms: the dominant Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) uses the terms proxy and back-to-back user agent; the older H.323 defines a gatekeeper. Terms used by product manufacturers for their products that might implement these and other functions include call manager, call server, VoIP switch, communication server and hosted PBX.

Regardless of what it is called, there are in general two main functions that may be performed by a soft switch: terminal control and call control.
Terminal control includes registration, admission and status. Registration means authenticating a telephone (or telephone client software) and associating the telephone and its IP address with a user in a directory. Admission means controlling whether that telephone is permitted to make or receive calls. Status is keeping track of the current status of the telephone, client software and/or user as an input to processing call requests.

Call control can involve a number of different functions, including address resolution, call routing, call signaling and call accounting. Address resolution means determining the numeric IP address of the called telephone. Call routing in an IP telephone network boils down to determining the IP address of the next hop for the phone call – usually a router – based on the destination address and the available networks and services. Call signaling includes initiating and terminating the phone call by exchanging control messages with a far-end device. This often includes negotiation of the multimedia attributes and coding protocol for the communications. The soft switch may also use the signaling and other information to generate Call Detail Records as an input to a call accounting system.

In addition to these basic functions, specific products may include hundreds of other functions such as those needed for call centers.

Source: Teracom’s Course 130: Understanding Voice over IP, pages 1.03 and 1.04

It gives your score automatically! 
This sample certification exam is part of Teracom’s quality all-inclusive training
- along with the course pages previews and/or DVD-video and CBT previews, 
   it is a good way to assess the level and quality of Teracom Training
- plus, assess your current knowledge level to help you decide you do need training!

Check it out!