delco@esun.att.com (Thomas P Capotosto) (03/13/91)
When the internetworking of LANs goes from simple bridging of a few LANs to a much more ambitious effort of inter-working many types of LANs distributed over wide areas, how do network designers (e.g., network planners, router/LAN/etc. vendors, consultants) cope with the complexity? In other words, how sophisticated are the network design tools being used? Are these elaborate networks still designed by back-of-the-envelope, rule-of-thumb or have sophisticated software-based tools evolved to fill this need? Most of the router/brouter vendors and consulting firms are relatively small outfits - do they develop (or purchase) design tools or are they able to base their designs on experience? How much faith should I put into the network design recommendations of router vendors and consultants, for example? Or with how large of a grain of salt should I take their input? Are design tools commercially available? Thanks, Fred delco@esun.att.com att!esun!delco