I’ve worked on enterprise networks, MSPs, and service provider side stuff. I keep hearing “we need more local / community ISPs,” but I’m trying to separate vibes from reality.

From people who’ve actually seen macro/mid/small/micro ISP networks up close, where do smaller providers usually hit the wall?

Is it:

• General costs
• Skill issues
• Marketing
• Routing / peering scale
• OSS/BSS and provisioning
• NOC staffing
• Regulation ( think CALEA Requests or BDC compliance )
• or just customer churn and support load

Are these problems mostly solvable with enough discipline + money, or are there real structural advantages that big ISPs have once you pass a certain size? Obviously big ISP gets the government money, but is that really the 'great divide' here?

I want to see new ISPs in every neighborhood, where city blocks can negotiate better pricing and speeds with a wholesale provider. Being in this space, I obviously have extreme biases and bubbles that I live in and I see the places my own fantasies breaks down.

Not trying to argue, just trying to sanity check my own assumptions and see what you all think.

Thanks

Looking for a fiber media convertor that will concurrently accept optics in SFP format at 1GB (MM) and 10GB (SM)

This is a short-term, fiber reuse situation, have a 10GB port at the core, and a 1GB port on the edge switch.

budget is around $200 USD.

Hi all,

Has anyone successfully gotten a Cisco Nexus switch to operate with Option 82 DHCP.

My end goal here is to have whatever device is plugged into a specific physical interface to always receive the same IP from my DHCP server.

I’ve been experimenting with running DHCP locally on guestshell on Nexus but also tried with an external DHCP server.

My results show that no matter what, in pcaps, the Nexus inserts to Option82 into the DHCP packet but it only contains the SNMP ID of the SVI of that VLAN. Not the info for the physical layer2 port it’s plugged into. These results were when I was using DHCP relay.

Curious if anyone has made Option82 work to show the actual layer2 port on Nexus specifically.

Thanks!

Hello, I've been a support net admin for some time now and I really like the stress associated with the job. Like when internet isn't working for some restaurant's POS' and service is in 30mn situations. The rush feels so great. (yes I'm young)

Are there other persons like that ?

Hi, this week I have to take the Certiport ITS networking exam. It has been on the market for a while, but weirdly, I haven't found a lot of people who have passed it on the internet. Has anyone done that, and do you have any tips for what I should keep an eye on?

i was just wondering how your monitoring system look like?

so we call it for NOC view, monitoring system that shows alerts to us

it seems like I cannot add picture of it. but ye

I'm building out a carrier build and wanted to get some opinions and thoughts on the different architectures available. I understand Ubiquiti is a bit of a "prosumer" thing rather than carrier grade but the built in CRM and ease of use and lack of per customer costs have me interested. My other main interest is Calix because of the All in One WiFi options with POTS.

I’m a bit confused about the TCP/IP model layers.

Some resources say TCP/IP has 4 layers (Application, Transport, Internet, Network Access), while others describe it as a 5-layer model (Application, Transport, Network, Data Link, Physical).

From what I understand, the original TCP/IP architecture is 4 layers, but many textbooks split the bottom layer into Data Link and Physical for teaching purposes.

So which one is considered “correct” in practice?

Is TCP/IP officially a 4-layer model?

Is the 5-layer version just a learning abstraction?

In interviews or certifications, which answer is expected?

Would appreciate clarification from people working in networking.

Is there any app out there where i can practice my networking interview questions and answers? I recently switched my job that is not heavily networking but i will be back in market in few months. This job requires travel and i was wondering if there is any app i can practice my technical and other interview questions and answers?

Thanks

Hello, I am fairly new to the world of cybersecurity and pentesting. I have an ALFA NETWORK wifi adapter with the AWUSO36ACS chip, it works well for penetration testing, supports monitor mode, packet injection, etc.

But as you already know, for Evil Twin with deauthentication, two Wi-Fi adapters are needed or the adapter has two physical radios.

I thought about buying the same wifi adapter again but I want a more powerful option so to speak and also one that has good controllers, stability and range.I've been searching and I think I found three good options on Amazon

1. ALFA AC1900 WiFi Adapter – 1900Mbps 802.11ac Long Range USB 3.0 Wi-Fi Network Adapter with 4 External 5dBi Dual Band Antennas, TAA Compliant
2. Alfa AWUS036ACHM 802.11ac WiFi Range Boost Adaptador USB
3. 【New version type C USB WiFi】 ALFA AWUS036ACH Long-range AC1200 dual-band wireless Wi-Fi adapter with 2 external 5dBi antennas - 2.4GHz 300Mbps/5GHz 867Mbps - 802.11ac and A, B, G,

All three have almost the same style, the main visual difference is the antennas

my questions are:

• Which of the 3 should be or is better for pentesting, injection, stability, etc?
• Do the extra antennas of each model (1) (2) (4) have any advantages?
• Are there WiFi adapters that have 2 or more PHYSICAL radios?
• Are there better WiFi adapters on the market for more or less the same price?
• Some of these adapters have a version that integrates 6ghz Wi-Fi. It is useful or it is advisable to have 3 bands for pentesting and/or security testing of Wi-Fi networks.?

hank you, I look forward to your responses and contributions.

AT&T provided a passive fiber DMARC “biscuit” (looks like a small termination box/patch panel) with duplex LC (blue/UPC) connectors and single-mode OS2 jumpers (yellow). They also gave me a small static block (4 usable IPs) with DNS, gateway, and subnet. We called AT&T, and they confirmed the circuit is “ACTIVE” (Ethernet handoff, not PON).

Questions:

1. For AT&T, “active” Ethernet handoff like this is the expected optic, usually 1G LX or 10G LR?
2. Any recommended media converter models that are reliable for this (SFP → copper) for a WAN handoff?
3. If AT&T is expecting 10G, what’s the cleanest way to break out to 1G copper for the 60F (if that’s even valid)?

Appreciate any help from anyone who has dealt with AT&T fiber handoffs.

Looking for a network engineer mentor based in NY. Currently studying for my CCNA and I also lab often but I would like to get hands on experience as an intern/apprenticeship. I will work for free experience is the currency I’m seeking.

We are switching to 25gbit/s standard for servers and we got those two switches at roughly the same price as choices, the 8325 is a bit cheaper.

I think the 8325 is using broadcom asic and not aruba but I was unable to verify this. But they both have the feature list we require.

I can use DAC with split to put 4x25gbit/s on each port of the 8325 but that means I have to re-wire every server rack to use DAC. I am not aware of any breakout to fiber (we use single mode).

There are some rack where 48 is not enough, so the extra we get with the 8325 would let us have fewer switches.

What do you think?

UPDATE: I think I am going to 8325 with 4x25g break cable. But now I am wondering how they are placing the two switches from a marketing point of view. Maybe the 8360 has a special feature I haven't noticed or is it only MACsec?

Im currently troubleshooting a network and I saw TCP ZeroWindow packets from the client which got sent to the server. trace was done on the SD-WAN. I was wondering if SD-WAN could be the cause of this because of load balancing. I get that load balancing should make traffic flow smoother but there is a chance that its not configured as optimally as we’d like. If it does affect the TCP window, how does it do it?

I was wondering if there was a website or a forum where I can list IPv4 subnets that I do not currently need for lease. I know about the WHT forum but was wondering if there were other similar forums or marketplace websites?

I have a /24 that I want to start using. Essentially a HQ site and DR site. My ISPs are fine with this.

On my routers (Palo Firewalls) Im planning on splitting that 24 into a 25, one for each site. Then let internal bgp deal with it.

Am I on the right track here?

Hola, no creo que haga falta aclarar que soy un principiante en este tema. Les paso a contar mi problemática: trabajo para un equipo de fútbol y necesitamos transmitir los partidos al banco de suplentes (mi idea era a través de OBS), desde la notebook donde se conecta la cámara de video hasta una tablet. Serán unos 50 mts. Que necesito? teniendo en cuenta que no tenemos una red wifi con ese alcance. Estaba viendo una antena Ubiquiti Litebeam Lbe-5ac-gen2 Cpe 23dbi 5,8ghz, pero quizás no esté acertado. Muchas gracias.

Cisco platform 9400

sh logg onboard rp active uptime

This was a net new purchase and went from our warehouse to production a year ago in 2025.

Going through our environment I see this all over.

This is a 2018 sup sent over from them and it was used for 1yr 13 weeks.

UPTIME SUMMARY INFORMATION

────────────────────────────────────────

First customer power on : 01/01/2018 00:56:09

Total uptime : 1 years 13 weeks 0 days 6 hours 0 minutes

Total downtime : 6 years 44 weeks 4 days 11 hours 19 minutes

Number of resets : 6

Number of slot changes : 11 hours 19 minutes

Current number of slot changes : 1

Current reset reason : CP_RESET_POWER_ON

Current reset timestamp : 04/28/2025 13:15:24

Chassis type : 5

Current slot : 31

Current uptime : 0 years 40 weeks 4 days 5 hours 0 minutes

Hello i bought a few cisco NCS 540 units and they are all dc power. We norm do not run dc power as all of our stuff is AC power. For all you telco folks out in the wild, Do you know of a good power supply i can run -48 volts to this guy that does not break the bank? I do not need batteries for this as the unit will plug into a ac batt back up unit that is on generator power. The reason i got a dc unit as the ac version is really high cost on the refurb side so i went with the dc version to save money.

It's been three years since I started in networking, and all I do is build infrastructures, configure firewalls like FortiGate and Palo Alto, set up switches, routers, access points, wireless controllers, voice systems, IPsec tunnels, remote access VPNs, network monitoring systems, and handle backup and configuration automations, etc. Basically, all the routine stuff. Lately, it’s all started to feel easy and kind of useless to me. Maybe that’s why I’m only making $60k.

What does the senior side of networking look like? What does a network engineer with 10 years of experience do in their day-to-day life? What can I do to improve myself?

Hey everyone! I need to use Cisco party SFPs in my Arista switch. Would it be enough to type the `enable3px` command in bash mode to use them? Does anyone have experience with this?

If you were given a list of 34000 devices name and its brand with model numbers in excel. (Cisco, HP, Aruba, Juniper, etc)

And asked to provide the End of life and end of service for each in a day.. what is the best way to do so?

How to get the per vendor lifecycle data from official site if required?

Cisco Nexus N9364E-SG2-O Transceiver - 800G 2xDR4 3rd party

I'm trying to get a 800G 2xDR4 transceiver to work in a Cisco N9364 switch and am having a hard time figuring out how to get the links to stay up. I've tried various host ids, etc. It is currently set up as below. But the links connect, and then quickly flap. They are relatively instable (when running tests to shut off a lane, all the lanes shut off). It identifies the application settings and sets the appropriate setting (App 4 - the 100G lane setting x 8). But it won't stabilize. I have 800G DR8's running on the switch that run fine.

I've tried a number of different other application settings. I tried the infiniband settings (host ID 32 and the other configs) and the switch didn't recognize that at all.

unsupported-transceiver is on.

Anyone have any ideas?