Telco's write best practices for packet switching networks

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

After the SNMP excitement I asked if anyone had suggestions on how
to architect or design a backbone network to be less suspectible to
problems.  It turns out the telephone industry has written a set of
best practices for the Internet.


Focus Group 2.A.2: Best Practices on Packet Switching. Karl Rauscher,
Lucent Technologies
http://www.nric.org/pubs/index.html

   Mr. Rauscher gave an example of the kind of information to be found
   there. The best practice used in the example states that critical
   packet network elements such as control elements, access in signaling
   gateways and DNS servers, should have firewall protection such as
   screening and filtering. One hundred percent of the respondents
   indicated they were implementing this best practice.

Cool, who has an OC-192 firewall on their control elements?  What is
a control element, is that the same as a router or is that a signaling
gateway?