June 1998 Presentation Abstracts

The North American Network Operators Group (NANOG)

Interesting Things You Can Do With OSPF (Howard Berkowitz)
After an introductory overview of the OSPF interior routing protocol, Berkowitz presents some interesting case studies of useful but non-obvious things one can do with OSPF, if one is willing to think "outside the box." The tutorial concentrates on determining requirements and network design, rather than detailed configuration, emphasizing ways that a high-powered OSPF domain can be a viable alternative to BGP for many customer and internal ISP applications. Also includes information about practical address management with OSPF.

Broadband VPNs - Outsourcing ISP services to Cable TV and XDSL Providers (Bruce Perlmutter, Bay Networks)

Data over cable TV and xDSL are technologies that are experiencing enormous growth as a means to provide high speed Internet access to consumers. Most implementations of these technologies require the cable provider to become an Internet Service Provider (ISP) - a business for which they are often ill prepared.

This presentation describes an architecture that allows cable providers to outsource the ISP function to a number of partner service providers. The cable provider installs and manages the physical plant, and bills the customer for services (voice, video, data) delivered over this plant. Data traffic from these customers arrives at the cable provider head end and is routed to an Internet Service Provider (or other data network) selected by the customer.

Even though the customers are connected to a common access infrastructure (XDSL or cable TV), they appear as though they are connected only to their selected ISP. This approach can be called a Virtual Private Network.

Issues discussed include: IP address allocation and packet routing, accounting and authorization mechanisms, and encryption and privacy issues.

Using Geosynchronous Satellite for Bandwidth Augmentation, News, and HTTP Broadcast Services (Avi Freedman, Net Access)

Covers details of implementing half-duplex satellite bandwidth augmentation and news/web cache broadcast over satellite. Net Access does all three on one signal; for bandwidth augmentation, a Cascade-based solution and a Cisco IP-tunneling-based solution will be presented.

Introduction to the NETPERF.NET Inter-Provider Network Performance Monitoring Project (Avi Freedman, Net Access)

Sponsored by Net Access, the project deploys pairs of servers (one web server, one query box) at each provider being studied, and generates semi-real-time NxN graphs of packet loss, latency, and throughput between the various providers.