WAN interest? Really?

Does anyone else struggle a little with WAN's? in terms of interest level?

Whenever I get on to WAN's and looking at Frame Relay (okay I'm only at the start of the theory really) I just get a bit 'this really isn't that interesting'. I like the LAN side of things because I guess I can configure that and can see things happening. But with WAN's I always find myself thinking 'oh that then goes off to the ISP and they look after that' and I just get a bit lost and think well what do I need to concern myself with?

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Comments

tomaifauchai

I agree that WAN's the most boring part of the CCNA but you'll need it for the exam and when you'll study other tracks your opinion about it might change with subjects such as load-balancing, mpls, bgp and QoS.

Monkerz

When I first started in networking I could totally agree with what you are saying, but once you land a network gig and deal with carriers everyday you will see that knowing WAN technologies will definitely help. Out of the three carrier's we use, one of them constantly tries to feed us bullsh*t and my manager's just eat it up because they aren't familiar with the ins and outs of WAN technologies.

My thoughts about demarcation are, anything on the customer's side is the customer's responsibility to fix, and anything on the carrier's side is the customer's responsibility to ensure adequate foot to scrotum ratio is achieved until the carrier admits to being wrong and fixes the actual issue.

Almost every time we have an outage, the carrier attempts to place blame on our gear. That is until we make them eat their words and tell them where to look for a problem in their network.

jude56g

Monkerz wrote: »

When I first started in networking I could totally agree with what you are saying, but once you land a network gig and deal with carriers everyday you will see that knowing WAN technologies will definitely help. Out of the three carrier's we use, one of them constantly tries to feed us bullsh*t and my manager's just eat it up because they aren't familiar with the ins and outs of WAN technologies.

My thoughts about demarcation are, anything on the customer's side is the customer's responsibility to fix, and anything on the carrier's side is the customer's responsibility to ensure adequate foot to scrotum ratio is achieved until the carrier admits to being wrong and fixes the actual issue.

Almost every time we have an outage, the carrier attempts to place blame on our gear. That is until we make them eat their words and tell them where to look for a problem in their network.

This cracks me up (in a good way). I go through the same thing daily, but I'm on the other side of the wire. From a service provider standpoint, I'm constantly finding and troubleshooting issues on the customer's side of the network which cause issues. Its important to have a thorough understanding of both LAN & WAN technologies in today's world.

As far as answering the OP, I have not found any CCNA topics which have bored me yet. Guess that it a good thing, I'll keep going till I find one then I will know its time to stop!

Forsaken_GA

WAN doesn't bore me. Frame Relay (and in older versions of the CCNA, ISDN) bore the hell out of me. MPLS as a WAN technology is quite interesting, to me at any rate. DSL and CMTS also interest me, and I'm sad that Cisco certs don't really provide much in the way of coverage on the topics.

jude56g

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

WAN doesn't bore me. Frame Relay (and in older versions of the CCNA, ISDN) bore the hell out of me. MPLS as a WAN technology is quite interesting, to me at any rate. DSL and CMTS also interest me, and I'm sad that Cisco certs don't really provide much in the way of coverage on the topics.

I agree 100% on that point. I have been working on CMTS for 6 years now, and I would like to see a cert related to that piece of the network.