It Is DONE! My ONT Study Guide is Complete…

I probably need to flesh out some more of the Cisco Unified Wireless marketing stuff, but other than that, I’m pretty happy with this guide. I’m thinking a couple of weeks of practice exams and labs ought to get me ready to finally take this exam and be 1/4 closer to the coveted CCNP. I have it in Word doc format, but if anyone requests it, I can post it in a html, txt, or other open format.

Enjoy!

New Net Neutrality Bill Proposed to Congress

I just read that a new net neutrality bill has been proposed in Congress.  This is interesting as it comes not long after I had an interesting conversation with someone about my QoS studies for ONT and the applications such technologies might have to do away with net neutrality.

I’m a huge believer in net neutrality, the premise that ISP’s should not be able to pick and choose what content has priority and give faster speeds to websites or servers that can pay higher fees, beyond just their uplink speed.  This would mean that if I wanted my site to be seen by the most people or have a faster download time, I’d not only have to get a fast connection to my server, but pay for my traffic to get priority through the networks of the ISP’s.  In effect, smaller companies and individuals would be drowned out by those with more money, reducing those without the money or power to the internet version of a public access cable channel while the fat cats would be HDTV premium cable channels.  To those of us who began using the internet back when it was mainly the home of university students, intellectuals, and the geek fringe and full of horizontal rules and new ideas, this idea is repulsive.  It would be the barbed wire fences destroying our open frontier and leaving so many of us to tell stories of the “good old days” like so many antiquated cowboys.

On the other hand…there is a need for businesses to be able to prioritize traffic, both within their own private networks and over the WAN links that connect their sites.  Essentially, QoS (Quality of Service) technologies arose out of the need to give small VoIP (Voice over IP) packets priority so that calls could be made over networks sharing bandwidth with data and not have jitter or difficult to understand conversations.  If I have a network like this and limited bandwidth over my connections between sites, I want to be able to set priorities on the types of traffic I send over those links and then have those priorities followed by any devices owned by the ISP between my sites.

As I was trying to explain in my conversation about this earlier, QoS is simply a set of technologies, neither good nor bad.  Yes, this could be used to destroy net neutrality, but it can also be used to let a poor startup make the most out of the bandwidth they can afford and continue to compete.  Like any technology, it is how it is used and what the intention is that determines whether it is good or evil.

Growing My Own Little ONT Lab

The ONT exam for CCNP is all about QoS with some wireless and VoIP thrown into the mix. Since we don’t use VoIP where I work (yet!) and we pretty much leave our wireless confined to its own vlan with its own cable modems, I’m thinking that this exam will be the least applicable to everyday work of them all, so I’ve decided to tackle it first rather than leave it looming at the end. So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed learning about QoS…it’s basically like writing rules for network bouncers…certain packets get special treatment, like a pretty girl in line for the club that only has to stand in line 5 minutes before the bouncer picks her out and lets her in. Other packets like VOIP get the red carpet treatment and never even touch the queue, like Paris Hilton hopping out of her Hummer and strutting right into the club. Other poor packets are like the rest of us, stuck in the line. Some of us get through in decent time if we show up at the right time and others of us are plain just told No and dropped.

In order to practice some of this, I’m building a virtual lab with dynamips. I’m using 4 2811 routers, 3 with Advanced-IP images and 1 with a Security-Plus image. I’m hoping that plus a real wireless AP and some sort of traffic generator ought to do the trick. As soon as I get everything set up, I’ll post a visio of my topology here.

Mainly, though, I’m glad to be back on the learning track again. I was starting to get cobwebs growing in my brain!