Comment by walrus01

I also totally agree that a lot of the challenges are not exactly 'network engineer' related, trying to run a small WISP has so many other things that aren't what you would find in CCNA/CCIE study materials or similar. One can feel much more confident in what they're doing once they have a real firm grasp of BGP, OSPF, various types of MPLS, metro ethernet stuff, optical networking, ptp microwave, linux sysadmin stuff for operational support systems and so on, but that's only one piece of the puzzle of many business process related things to cover.