Bill, Skipping John's message for a minute with the number of small ISP's out there it is actually forseeable that a book on starting an ISP might be possible to a limited extent. I would have welcomed such a book when I set up our internet gear (we would qualify as a medium sized ISP in our own right.) Now to get back to John's message, although there is some information out there that could be read there are a number of questions that you should ask yourself as far as scope of the project, number of sites, technical level at the remote sites, do you need to monitor Sniffers and the like or just plain Openview/Spectrum. Also does this NOC have to monitor and dispatch repair techs only or does it have to answer questions like how do I change my password on the server in my office. What about monitoring of the various servers in the enterprise? Novell? NT? Unix flavors, etc. Put all this together and the project manager in charge better have done it before at least once, or else this would quickly become a moneypit. Another major consideration is how much money and floor space is available for the NOC. I have seen several companies under-estimate the floor space needed and end up shoving stuff into corners to get it all into the allocated space, or scrimping money because the budget didn't live up to the pipe dreams of over eager planning personnel. David Greer Project Manager, Wide Area Telecommunications General Nutrition Companies, Inc. David-Greer@GNC-HQ.COM -----Original Message----- From: Goldstein_William@bns.att.com <Goldstein_William@bns.att.com> To: John_W_Connors@res.raytheon.com <John_W_Connors@res.raytheon.com>; nanog@merit.edu <nanog@merit.edu> Date: Monday, March 16, 1998 3:36 PM Subject: RE: Building a NOC