Third Annual Conference

October 5, 2001, at the Sheraton Harborside in Portsmouth

Roundtable

Last-Mile Alternatives

All ISPs would like to be able to offer "broadband" service to our customers which long for faster connections; but we find ourselves frustrated trying to get the "last mile" to the customer. This Roundtable will discuss alternative paths for bridging the last mile, including:

Verizon ADSL;
CLEC xDSL;
dry copper;
wireless;
cable modems.

Session #1

Sue Ashdown is the Executive Director of the American ISP Association and a co-owner of the Internet service provider XMission, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Ms. Ashdown moved to Washington DC last year in order to advocate on behalf of smaller local ISPs across the country -- building on her work as the Director of the Coalition of Utah Independent ISPs. The Utah Coalition was one of the first state ISP associations in the country to become actively involved in competitive and regulatory issues before the state's Public Service Commission, Legislature, and the FCC. Ms. Ashdown is a graduate of the University of Utah and a frequent contributor to industry publications and roundtables, providing the independent ISP perspective.

Telecom 271: Lessons from the Bell Wars

Internet Service Providers face challenges similar to most small businesses. Hiring talent, paying talent, getting customers, keeping customers, solving numerous and constant technical problems, and keeping an eye out for the next killer app. All before lunchtime. How then, can an ISP be expected to spare time for political work? And will it make any difference? This session will explain why political activism is as necessary to your business as a profit margin. And it will teach you the fundamentals of grass-roots political organizing; focusing on the best ways to make an impact when time and money are scarce.

Session #2

Calvin Dowling is Vice-President of Professional Services for TTLC Internet and IT Solutions.

Adventures in Wireless

Session #3

Shawn Fitzgerald is the Cisco Account Manager for New Hampshire. A NH native, he has been in the industry for over 7 years, starting at Cabletron. He currently telecomutes (VPN) from his virtual office in Exeter.

Ed Caswell is a Systems Engineer at Cisco, with a specialty in VoIP. Before coming to Cisco, Ed worked for CSC at Bath Iron Works. Ed has also worked for Unisys and US Surgical, managing very large, complex networks including VoIP. Ed is a Maine native and telecommutes (VPN) from his virtual office in Gray, Maine.

Voice over IP

Session #4

Jeff Peters

End-to-End Service Level Verification

Session #5

John Leslie, President of JLC.net, has been spending full-time running his ISP business since 1994. With a networking background going back to the early days of ARPAnet, John likes to believe he understands routing protocols.

BGP -- The Braindead Gateway Protocol

Most people think the Border Gateway Protocol described in RFC 1771 is complicated (which it is) and provides all information needed for routing (which it doesn't). Nonetheless, it is the tool we must use to advertise routing information to the Internet backbone, unless we're content to put all our eggs in one basket and trust our single upstream provider to deliver all incoming traffic all the time.

In order to participate in the NHISPA Peering System, somebody needs to "speak" BGP on your behalf. If you have a separate path to NHISPA Peering (or multiple paths to the Internet), the "BGP speaker" really should be at your location.

This session will explain what a "routing protocol" is (and why it has very little to do with "routing"); and proceed to outline the (very limited) data that is propagated by BGP. The open-source "zebra" routing software (with Cisco-like configuration commands) will be introduced, and a sample configuration will be explained. An extensive handout, including references and examples, will also be made available on the event.nhispa.org website.

General Discussion

The NHISPA Peering System

The NHISPA Peering System provides basic IP connectivity over fabric that stays in New Hampshire, ensuring low latencies. Pairs of ISPs may establish their own peering, or take advantage of NHISPA member benefits, such as:

Routing services to ISPs that don't want to talk BGP to every other ISP;
Cacheing Proxy;
Akamai Edge Network Acceleration;
Usenet Peering.

We are planning to connect all NHISPA members using both Frame-Relay and SDSL at "nearly free" prices. Thus each ISP can afford to increase peering bandwidth as necessary to ensure fast service to New Hampshire sites.

This session will discuss reasons for peering, implementation and dependability of the current peering, and perceptions of peering by ISPs who haven't tried it, as well as other peering service we may wish to consider.

Last updated October 4, 2001.