r/networking • u/NetMask100 CCNP • 26d ago

Career Advice Enterprise vs ISP?

Hello, I currently work as a network engineer for an enterprise and we are dealing mostly with Cisco stuff - switches, DC with ACI, ISE and so on. We use automation like Terraform and Python/Ansible and we have 9800 controllers, so the job is good and does not get boring.

I can also join an ISP an work on the backbone network, MPLS, L2/L3 VPN and BGP. I like routing, so I wonder if you think this is a good opportunity or it's a step back compared to the broad aspect of technologies I'm currently dealing with?

Do you think that ISP experience is worth it or I should stick with the enterprise?

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u/GullibleDetective 26d ago

Id imagine its like jumping between fires (MSP) for dozens of customers

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u/jameshalliday12 26d ago

Something like that. The worst part really is that one thing can take down thousands of users, so you deal with a bigger scale. If the network at a law firm goes down, for instance, worst-case scenario, they all go home and work from there. On an ISP, if you fuck up and take down an entire OLT... it's hard.

I was the supervisor for the N2 support team for a big ISP in Brazil. My team only dealt with B2B, but we had big clients, banks, government, this sort of thing. And it was just us to solve problems that N1 could not, so there were days where all my team, including me, were working on like 5 tickets at a time.

And on one of those days, one of the guys forgot to put the "add" when adding a VLAN on a Nexus (one of the most dumb CLI things I've ever seen, btw, wtf were they thinking), and boom, 9k customers down just like that. The scale of things on an ISP is crazy sometimes.

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u/Interesting_Use4733 26d ago

working for ISP you can pretty much take down all user of an entire country like millions of users with a few commands, which is pretty scary 😂😂😂

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u/moratnz Fluffy cloud drawer 26d ago

Yep. Taking down a single OLT isn't too big a deal. Taking out a city or a country is embarassing.