Service Provider Engineers

Are there any SP Engineers here? I work for a provider, and it was my first real engineering position. I'm curious what other SP folks do day to day and how your CCNA skills to your job. I'm also curious what type of network gear / topologies you work on.

I work on SONET, ATM, Metro-E, CMTS, Switching, Routing, and a little server admin.

So, what do YOU do? Anyone?

P.S. I'm also willing to answer any questions for those of you who work in the enterprise who may be curious about the work in the provider network

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Comments

vinbuck

SP Engineer checking in...

I work on the Telco side of SP Engineering and do trouble resolution, design, testing and some planning. We work on just about all forms of copper transport, ADSL, HDSL4, SHDSL, EFM, Legacy T-1 and SONET, ATM and Ethernet fiber transport. We also work on some 4G and WiFi "last mile" type stuff. I spend most of my time in core routing and switching using OSPF, BGP and MPLS but also support IPTV multicast video and some SIP transport. Lately i've been doing a fair amount of OSPF and MPLS research for traffic engineering. We have a Cisco/Adtran mix for most of the Core/Access stuff.

CCNA was a great foundation (especially since i'm always dealing with CCIE SP level material day-to-day and have spent the last two years in "catch-up" mode) but CCNP has really given me the foundation to start implementing and troubleshooting advanced Routing and Switching designs. I'm planning on tackling the CCIP later this year as prep work for the CCIE and I use all the stuff in it daily anyway.

Those aspiring to CCIE should look at going the path of Service Provider. When working with complex multi-vendor networks, you are often forced to look at network problems in excruciating detail to solve them. I'm always having to read an RFC or some other doc to figure out why vendor A and vendor B don't play well together even though they are both "standard." Sometimes even the vendor "experts" don't know exactly why their product performs the way it does. It's especially satisfying to tell the "expert" that flew in from overseas that you've found bugs in his product and you have the data to prove it.

vanquish23

While I dont work for and ISP, I do support the Army command on a special project. We provide land based, T-1,T-3, OSC connections in and out of the "Network Control Center" as well as SCPS satilite modem converting RF signals to IP signal connections overseas to our Army customers. We have Cisco routers and Switches, Server, and crypto, as well as Juniper WAN routers that support some of the base, but dont deal with the larger Cisco ISP devices.

CCNA is very important with our job, even when troubleshooting problems with customers.