S-38.001 Telecommunications Forum –99
Laboratory of Telecommunications Technology
Prof. Raimo Kantola
Examination based on chapters 1,2,4,5,9,10,11,12,13,15,16 of the book "ISP Survival Guide – Strategies for Running a Competitive ISP" by Geoff Huston
Possible Questions
- What were the major milestones that shaped the birth of the Internet until 1986?
- What is the approximate business value of an Internet customer? Justify.
- Why has the bottom-up approach been succesfull in Internet technology development?
- What were the business reasons that lead to the birth of the ISPs late 1980’s and early 90’s?
- How can the ISPs keep up their growth while competition pushes down the prices? What is the likely outcome of saturation of the market?
- Explain TCP principles.
- Explain IP addressing based on CIDR.
- Describe the structure and main functions of home user access part of the Internet. What is a reasonable level of traffic aggregation in the Access?
- Describe the cost structure of an ISP. What are the cost factors and what are their typical relationships?
- What are the most important network design criteria for an ISP?
- List different types of ISPs. Give the key qualifying criteria for each type.
- Explain differences between a repeater, a bridge and a router.
- Give a classification of routers. Give qualifying criteria and explain differences between types.
- How should an ISP select its routing equipment? What are most important selection criteria?
- Calculate packet propagation delay in vacuum over a 6000km satellite link.
- What is FR good for?
- Explain major security concerns, approach and priorities of an ISP.
- What should be covered in the security policy of an ISP?
- How should an ISP respond to a security breach?
- Charactirize Internet markets. How can an ISP add value to its service?
- What are current business opportunities for an ISP to extend its service?
- Compare fax and e-mail as services for business transactions. Can e-mail make fax obsolete?
- Describe fax/e-mail interoperation service scenarios.
- Analyse the business potential of Voice over Internet.
- Explain how an e-mail service works.
- Describe the possible ISP e-mail service propositions to a network customer.
- Explain the organisation of e-mail service to dial customers by an ISP.
- Describe ISP services to customers as a domain name retailer.
- Explain modes of web caching. What are the consequences and business issues. Explain inherent controversies.
- Analyse the business case for Web Caching in Finland with parameters: cost of International carriage is $100/Gbyte, ISP International traffic is 2000 Gbytes/month, Cache up-front cost is
$50 000 and maintenance $8000/month. Make reasonable assumptions where necessary.
- Describe web caching deployment models and challenges.
- Describe Web Hosting service models and issues related to those models.
- Describe types of USENET services provided by an ISP. Discuss possible future development of the service.
- Define VPN. Describe models of VPNs relevant in the Internet context.
- Explain the virtual router concept.
- Characterise the current ISP business climate as a starting point for business planning. What are the major challenges in ISP business planning.
- Describe potential alternative business objectives for an ISP. What are the risks inherent in the alternatives?
- Analyse suitability of cash flow based growth strategy in the Internet business environment.
- Describe a sensible cost calculation method for a projected ISP operation.
- Describe the cost structure of service operations. What are prevalent elements.
- Calcualte and analyse NAS costs per SIO provided that 10 000 dial customers need to be serviced, NAS port cost is $500, maintenance is 8% of purphase price per annum. Make reasonable assumptions where necessary.
- Describe the structure of Sales&Marketing costs and the cost of business operations.
- Explain alternatives and business issues of ISP pricing. How should an ISP select its pricing structure?
- What are current and potential motivations and objectives for public regulation of the Internet?
End of questions.