BGP before ROUTE?

Has anyone here ever taken the BGP exam before ROUTE/BSCI? I have been studying BGP in preparation for the ROUTE exam and have really enjoyed. I am thinking about going ahead and taking the BGP exam while everything is fresh. I see that most people seem to take the BGP+MPLS composite which makes sense financially.

I admit that I am weak on the IGPs and have almost zero knowledge of IPv6 so I have some work to do before I am ready for ROUTE.

I am thinking about taking the exams in this order BGP, ROUTE, MPLS, QOS.
Should I consider BGP+MPLS first? The exam appears to be very condensed with little depth in each technology.

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

APA

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

I actually took QoS first on the CCIP track found it to be an easy exam. I went BSCI -> QoS -> BGP -> MPLS.

+1 for this path as well

Definitely lockdown your knowledge of IGP and the basics of BGP via ROUTE before moving onto BGP and MPLS......

APA

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

creamy_stew wrote: »

That's the state of affairs in alot of networks, sadly. It's why consultants will have no shortage of work

Yep we've just acquired a fairly large ISP who decided it was a good idea to carry all their BGP routes in their infrastructure IGP(OSPF).

Fun times for clean up.......coming my way soon

wolverene13

jovan88 wrote: »

i always thought layer 8 is "user is an idiot layer". Maybe i should go back to learning my OSI model

Haha, we have different structures of the same model. The "PEBKAC Layer" is layer 10 in my OSI model because that trumps all other layers.

wolverene13

DPG wrote: »

I have Level 3, XO, Cogent, and Qwest within a few dollars a meg of each other.

Somehow (not sure who was able to do this; maybe it's because my company is so huge) we've managed to pay a flat monthly rate for our Cogent and XO circuits, but Level 3 is billed per-usage. We also own LightCore (part of our company, but somehow still a separate entity), so we use those links whenever possible, even though we're routing the customer traffic 1,000 miles in one direction, just to come back the other way. (We just bought Qwest, by the way, so I may be able to help you with any issues you may have here in the future).

DPG wrote: »

Have you used/deployed the Internap FCP? I see a lot of implementations in which financially cheaper routes are chosen over lower latency routes.

Man, I wish we would. It certainly would make my life easier. Instead, we just mess with the BGP metrics to route traffic over the cheaper links.

Forsaken_GA

wolverene13 wrote: »

Somehow (not sure who was able to do this; maybe it's because my company is so huge) we've managed to pay a flat monthly rate for our Cogent and XO circuits, but Level 3 is billed per-usage.

When you say pay a flat monthly fee, is your circuit capped, or do you get charged for overages?

I think it's absolutely idiotic to pay a commit rate on a circuit, I've always preferred to be billed on 95th percentile. It's like buying cell phone service, if you don't use all your minutes a month, you didn't come out ahead in the transaction

wolverene13

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

When you say pay a flat monthly fee, is your circuit capped, or do you get charged for overages?

I think it's absolutely idiotic to pay a commit rate on a circuit, I've always preferred to be billed on 95th percentile. It's like buying cell phone service, if you don't use all your minutes a month, you didn't come out ahead in the transaction

Our circuits with those carriers are usually 1 Gig or 10 Gig. There's no cap because we carry traffic for 7 or 8 million DSL suscribers and tens of thousands of T-1 (ATM, Frame, MPLS) and Ethernet customers (who also have up to 1 Gig circuits with us) and need all the bandwidth we can get. Normally we have anywhere from 2 to 4 redundant 10 Gig links to other carriers, but sometimes there's just two redundant 1 Gig links in a given market if it's a small one.

Paul Boz

Add my name to the list of those that did the QoS exam quickly after the ONT. The tests were like 50% of the same material. I think I did the QoS three weeks after the ONT because I'd way over studied QoS on the ONT itself.