On Thu, 11 Jun 2015 14:24:31 +0200, Ruairi Carroll <ruairi.carroll@gmail.com> said: > What I found is that back in early-mid 00's, the industry was a > black box. Unless you knew someone inside of the industry... I suspect this is partly a result of the consolidation that went on. In the mid 1990s when I started, there were tons of small mom and pop ISPs with 28.8 modems stacked on Ikea shelving. The way that I got my first job as a student was literally by hanging around one of them and pestering them until they hired me part time. These small ISPs grew and most were eventually were acquired and people who stuck around through that -- especially the often quite complicated network integration that happens after acquisitions -- learned quite a lot about how the Internet operates at a variety of scales and saw a variety of different architectures and technical strategies. The scale and stability of today's Internet means that path is mostly closed now I think, particularly if what you want to do is get a job at a big company. But not entirely, there are still lots of rich field-learning opportunities on the periphery, in places where large carriers fear to tread... -w