Cisco Live 2008

This year’s Cisco Live Conference will be held in Orlando, Florida (June 22 – 26, 2008). Wish I had the opportunity to visit it because it certainly gives you the chance to learn about new networking technologies and share ideas with others. You can read more about it at http://www.cisco-live.com/about.php.

Cisco Systems Inc., as a company which brought many innovations in the networking industry presents this year’s Cisco Live Conference with a slogan “Ignite Innovation”. The same slogan was used earlier this year (January 21 – 24, 2008) when Cisco held Cisco Networkers Conference in Barcelona, Spain. At that conference CARNet (Croatian Academic and Research Network) was awarded with Cisco Networkers Innovation Award for the project e-Islands in the category “Most Society Impacting Network of the Year”. Complete list of Innovation Award winners is available at http://www.cisco.com/web/europe/cisco-networkers/2008/onsite/index.html.

The goal of the project e-Islands involved broadband technologies to connect schools which are placed in far and unreachable islands. First of all, I have to mention the background information about the project. As many of you probably know, Croatia is a country with the largest archipelago (to be precise, 698 islands, 389 islets and 78 reefs) in the Adriatic Sea, and second largest in the Mediterranean Sea (as you may guess, Greece has the greatest archipelago). Data was taken from this wikipedia article. From 698 islands, only 47 are inhabited (the criteria is that at least one person resides on the island).

There are many problems for the island inhabitants because islands are scattered all over the Adriatic sea, making it difficult to connect them to the cities on the shore and thus they have very low number of inhabitants. Particular problems are with schools. They don’t have many pupils and most of them are deserted because teachers are not willing to live on the islands because of the isolation. That leaves the children who reside on the islands in very hard position because they have to take long journeys with ferry boats to the schools on the shore. To bring the knowledge to the children and not the other way around , Croatian Government started project e-Islands. The main goal was to keep the children on the islands by providing them with far better education and other possibilities.

Main phase of the project was to connect schools on the shore with remote schools on the islands by using wireless links and H.323 video conference equipment. All of that was made to enable remote teaching in the classrooms.

The following Cisco devices and technologies were used:

• Cisco ISR 2811 (Integrated services router)
• Cisco Unified Wireless solution
• Cisco Unified Communications solution

You can view the promo movie about e-Islands project at CARNet Media on Demand centre by using this link http://mod.carnet.hr/index.php?q=watch&id=372.

Must admit that I am very proud because of the fact that CARNet was awarded. My colleagues showed what can be accomplished when you work as a coherent team. Who knows, maybe in the future, as my career develops, I’ll have the opportunity to take part in developing similar projects and solutions.