In article <v0300782bb135f100b9c8@[198.3.136.121]>, dean@av8.com (Dean Anderson) wrote:

There pretty clearly *are* routers in the diagram. Those would be those little blue and green interconnected dots. You can tell by the "Large Capacity Routers and Switches" label. Perhaps you didn't see the same diagram I saw.

User's Comm Equipment --------------------- There would be routers around the firewall (or the firewall is a router doing simple packet filtering). There would typically be routers inside the corporation. There would often be routers on a LAN (depending on your definition of "local"). Local Loop Carrier ------------------ Leased lines (T1s, 56Kb, etc.) will typically have routers on each end of the line. Should include @home (www.home.com) ISP's POP --------- You dial into a router. Cisco has a web site, www.cisco.com. User Services ------------- Not always provided by the ISP. For example, DNS, email, USENET, and other services are almost always provided by your company. They are provided by your ISP if you're dialing into your ISP. Again, routers could be between these services. Should include web servers as one of these services; some ISPs use web servers for trouble-ticket reporting. ISP backbone ------------ The first time we've seen routers Online content -------------- Typically provided by an ISP (which could be your own ISP) or a corporation. You're really going "back up" the same chain of possibilities that we went down. Understanding this would help people a lot -- each site is similar to their own and made similar decisions for who hosts email, DNS, firewalling, etc. Origins of Online Content ------------------------- Same as 'online content' -- you're going "back up".

I might suggest that more detail on the variation of the corporate network could be helpful. Internal networks of large corporations like Hitachi (7th largest corporation in the world) are many times more complicated than even large ISP interconnects. I find this is the biggest problem that most people I talk to have. They understand a dialup connection. They understand an ethernet. They don't understand that the technology to scale their company from 5 to 50 to 300 to 10,000 is much different from one scale to another. They mainly don't understand the scaling issues.

I agree. The diagram of the corporation should somehow indicate this. Not sure how it could fit into the current web page as it is designed, though. -Dan Wing