4 Chapters into it...

Four chapters into the book and I have to say, I'm learning a lot!

MPLS is an incredible technology, very intelligent, can be complex or simple, but very powerful none the less. I can see the benefits to both the Service Provider and the Customers.

An interesting miss-conception that I had about WHY you should go with MPLS, the thought that it's a "faster" network because it doesn't have to look up destination IPs instead it simply looks at the label appended to a packet, was blown out of the water. And it should've been obvious too... Routers are getting so much faster and smarter so the resources used to do an IP look up now is nominal AND its not "slow" by any means. There are more COMPELLING reasons why MPLS is the WAN technology to go with.

I think I made a good choice in pursuing SP, I work for an SP and so I can kind of relate to it better, making it that much more interesting. Although the argument can be made that it's not valuable in the "real world" meaning outside of the SP realm but it's good to know both the enterprise side and the service provider side. The only disadvantage I can see is opportunity cost :) Not being able to study VOICE or SECURITY or more importantly have a life :)