Customer Reviews

ISP Survival Guide: Strategies for Running a Competitive ISP

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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

Readers who found this book lucid and helpful must be part of the editorial staff or the publisher's company.

After reading other's negative comments and passing them off as cursory and badly evaluated, I bought the book anyway. To my surprise, the negative comments were understated. The book was poorly written, has enormous gaps in the telecommunications area as related to the practical buildout of an ISP at both the hardware and business level. I returned the book after 10 days of thorough and painful reading. I cannot recommend someone spend money on this book. My apologies to the author but this is an honest response. The author could also use a few more years of grammar and composition before he publishes another book. I'm sure he knows his field but he simply cannot communicate it.

This book misses the point, written by techie who worked for a University network that was sold to telco which vowed to crush every ISP in the country, the title is somewhat ironical.

This dude has never managed a real commercial ISP in the business sense. Other then a few technical tid bits you should already know it offers little in the way of "survival strategies".

Maybe that's the point if you expect to survive in the business world focusing on router protocols and authentication servers your days are numbered.

If you are thinking of setting up an ISP this book covers some of the basics your technical people should already know inside out. If you are looking for advise on survival in the current market place forget it.

I would recommend browsing through the cisco online documentation its free and more up to date for technical details and freshmeat its related sites and debian.org for linux info.

This book is dating quickly as you would expect an internet book to do, emerging trends in adsl, 3rd gen gsm etc didn't really exist when written.

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.

This book succeeds as a handbook--it is truly comprehensive. Unfortunately, it lacks depth in virtually every topic, and the writing is unacceptable--where was the editor?

Anyone in a management position within an ISP--or consulting for one--will be most effective in their job if they are familiar with the material in this book. Starting with the history of the Internet, it zips through a quick introduction of TCP/IP and immediately becomes bogged down in an interminably long and obtuse discussion of routing (Perlman is both easier to read and more detailed). A tortuous 45 page discussion of VPNs concludes with a terse and useful 8-word definition.

In spite of its flaws, it manages to at least touch on telecom technology, QoS, security, the role of the Internet authorities, and relationships between ISPs. The majority of ISP product offerings are discussed, and it includes a lengthy discussion of ISP business models. Everything is here but marketing, which is covered in a different Wiley text.

The book tries to be all things to all people, but specialists in any of the areas discussed, from technology to business, could find a better, more specific source, and it could easily be half this length without losing any information. A usable handbook would be twice this size, and half as prolix. Until such a text exists, I reluctantly recommend this one. Skim it if you have to, but if you work in the business you should be familiar with everything in this book.

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.

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'.

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.

I am non american, so that I can't evaluate the style of the author or his business capacity... Nevertheless, I think that this is one of the few books on this topic who presents a general view on ISP architecture and business. If someone knows an other book on this topic, I am interested in!!
It's not a book for specialist, you must not expect to configure cisco routers with it. But if you already know the basic of networks, it's a good introduction to ISP

This book gives you a great guide for designing and managing an ISP. Anybody thinking aboout setting up an ISP should start with this book.You do still need alot more detailed knowledge of BGP, and internet services such as DNS, Sendmail, AAA authentication etc.