Planning, Negotiating, Implementing, and Managing Wide Area Networks

Our objective in writing this book was to transmit our work experience planning and implementing wide area networks in the last twenty years. There is a lack of literature in this area of expertise and the typical lessons learned by the professionals in the field are rarely documented and shared. Additionally, there is a tendency to focus in technical aspects in detriment of planning and managing aspects in the available literature. Another motivating factor was the perception that there is a gap between the people studying algorithms in the universities and the professionals in the field of planning and operating the large WANs. Therefore, our intention with this book is also to reduce this gap showing how those resources (algorithms) can be effectively applied. Our intention is to provide the reader with a general view about how WANs should be planned, priced, negotiated and managed in administrative terms. It isn’t our intention to discuss aspects linked to the technical management of large WANs, given the fact that there are already plenty of literature regarding this subject. The target audience of this book is the IT managers and telecom managers of medium and large organizations and we are assuming that the reader has some basic understanding of the subject. We divided this book into twenty chapters, which can be read separately. In the chapter “General view” we explain what from our point of view constitutes a telecommunications network, subsequently we define the concepts and terminologies adopted throughout this book. We strongly suggest that you read these chapters even if you intend to read the following ones piecemeal.