ISP Survival Guide: Strategies for Running a Competetive ISP

by Geoff Huston

Book Overview

Introducing the ISP bible for the networking and telecomm industry. To put it mildly, cyberspace business is booming. There are presently more than 6,000 Internet Service Providers worldwide, and about 600 new providers are springing up each quarter. However, the ISP business is still very young and without precedent-no how-to manual or foolproof start-up recipe exists for those who want a piece of the action. As ISPs mount an ambitious challenge...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471314994
• ISBN13: 9780471314998
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 688 Pages
• Weight: 2.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Simply outstanding value...

This book is a must if you want to set-up, maintain and survive with an ISP business and success in mind. I was in the process of setting up a ISP business and desperately looking for some advice, insight, requirements, and the lot.When I started reading this book I was overwhelmed by the amount of information... it seemed all to long to get anywhere... I started skipping pages, sections, chapters until I realised how valuable the contents was. Back to the beginning and I started all over again, reading this book... thoroughly. I've read it twice in meantime and parts of it repeatedly over the one year since I've got this book.It is still (and of course) possible to take the cowboy approach, considering the modem-ratio as the 'holy' figure which does it all for you, and jump into it... believe it or not, you will realise sooner than you may be pleased or anticipate, that you find yourself in critical situations, capacity-wise, service-wise. You could have had avoided it all by doing your homework... part of it would be reading this book, which gives you all the information to base your decision-making process on.We have setup quickly some LINUX boxes, Apache, RADIUS, sendmail over a period of one week, started quickly and grew faster than expected... and retreated!, to prevent to go down, due to the lack of policies, procedures, and man-power required despite the capability of high-automation... we have been warned ;-)You may think this book is for the big guys, you are wrong... you either have to understand what you are getting yourself into, you have to know the game or someone who knows it... this book will help you understand the game. It inspired me to go for further more in-depth training (currently persuing my CCNP certification).I'm happy with the style of writing, academic, accurate, including the background and the history to understand the Internet's constant and sometimes rapid change... IPv6 is to 'released' in six months... nevertheless, I was a bit surprised about the lengthiness of some sentences, which I believed are more a custom of Germans (like myself)...If you really want to know what's going on or what to expect, this is it! It is for the serious reader, it is not a "for Dummies" edition... or have you ever wondered what makes the difference between (say) Excel in 12 hours compared to Using Excel on 900 pages! Enjoy... I can only recommend it.Max Grenkowitz, Systems Engineer, MCNE, MCSE

Good, but I have some advice for the author

I'm about half way through this book. I am also a computer book writer and I bought this because I wanted to get into the head of someone who set up and ran and ISP. The book has excellent content. But I have some advice for the author:Stop with these long-winded sentences. I know you are from a different country where writing in the "pompous" style of English is probably acceptable, but please just try to get to the point. These sentences that go on about the importance of this and that both before and after you say it are unnecessary. As we say here in America, "just give me the beef."Unfortunately, many readers feel they must read every word to get your point. But then after trudging through some of these heavily worded paragraphs, I am left wondering "what's the point?" The wording is so complex in some cases that you really can't skim through paragraphs to find the most important stuff. Here's an example from page 29 (I picked this at random and "voiced" it in):"This hybrid model of the core academic and research network with a central funding component providing free service and an associated fee-based commercially oriented resale operation was a common phase at this point in the evolutionary path. The resale operation was typically constructed so as to enable structural cross-subsidization of the cost of providing service to the core academic and research constituency. This cross-subsidization, together with access to increasing economies of scale in transmission cost, enable the network to undertake the seemingly impossible: to continue to grow at rates that were exponential, so that usage doubled in 8-to-12-month intervals, while exposing the academic and research institutional members of the network to no cost increase, or, at worst, linear cost increases."I think what the author meant to say was:"A centrally funded network that was able to resell its bandwidth and services helped the Internet grow. At the same time, the resale of bandwidth helped to subsidize other services."OK, maybe that is not the best rewrite. I know there are some important concepts buried in the original paragraph. How about putting those in a quick bullet list so we can get the point and move on?Like I said, this is an excellent book with great content. I'm writing this because I hope it helps the author with future books, which I am looking forward to reading.

Excellent book in all respects

This is an excellent book even if you're NOT running your own ISP, but want to understand ALL of the issues involved. It's great for anybody whose profession necessitates an understanding of Internet connectivity.

Excellent insight into ISP's tech. and commercial mechanics

Despite of its adventurous title a relevant and objective book. Within the 625 pages, no sentence is superfluous. You feel the author's intent to be clear and precise. He pinpoints the essential factors that determine the business of an ISP. Suspected to become the ISP's bible. Comparable to Comer's 'Internetworking with TCP/IP' or Tanenbaum's 'Computer Networks'.

Solid coverage of ISP issues and services

Knowing what the issues are is often harder than finding solutions to those issues.Geoff Huston presents many of the issues that are facing ISPs and those supplying ISP-like services. This is a book that is more about "what you should be doing", rather than "how you should be doing it".Both technical and business issues are covered, from both the perspective of US and non-US service providers.I buy and read around $5,000 worth of technical books each year - Geoff Huston's new book certainly makes the top 5% of these.