An Interview With The Cisco Packet Tracer Team

At the National Science Foundation sponsored Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) combined (The Mid Pacific Center for ICT and The National Center for ICT ) winter conference last month held at the City College of San Francisco , I had the opportunity to interview three key members of the Cisco Systems Packet Tracer Team - Dennis Frezzo, Isaac Majerowicz and Mark Chen.

Packet Tracer is a network simulator used by hundreds of thousands of Cisco Networking Academy students around the world. Recently, Packet Tracer version 5.1 was released - here's some info from an FAQ on the product found on the Packet Tracer website:

Packet Tracer (PT) 5.1 is a comprehensive, networking technology teaching and learning program that offers a unique combination of realistic simulation and visualization experiences, assessment and activity authoring capabilities, and opportunities for multiuser collaboration and competition. Innovative features of the PT 5.1 software will help students and teachers collaborate, solve problems, and learn concepts in an engaging and dynamic social environment. Some of the benefits of Packet Tracer 5.1 are as follows:

• Provides a realistic simulation and visualization learning environment that supplements classroom equipment
• Enables multiuser, real-time collaboration and competition for dynamic learning
• Enables authoring and localization of structured learning activities such as labs, demonstrations, quizzes, exams, and games
• Empowers students to explore concepts, conduct experiments, and test their understanding
• Allows students and teachers to design, build, configure, and troubleshoot networks using virtual equipment
• Supports a variety of teaching and learning tasks such as lectures, group and individual labs, homework, and competitions
• Supports integration with external applications through an API to enhance the functionality of Packet Tracer in areas such as curriculum and assessment delivery, games, accessibility, and interfacing with real equipment.

In the interview, the team describes the Packet Tracer product.

Cisco Packet Tracer Team Interview Part 1 (9 min 15 sec):



Cisco Packet Tracer Team Interview Part 2 (9 min 45 sec):



I'm really excited about version 5.1 - especially when you consider the user base. The ability to integrate Packet Tracer 5.1 with external applications will provide some innovative academic and training solutions. You can find out more about the Cisco Network Academy and Packet Tracer here.

Other ways to access this interview:

You can watch a high-definition stream of the entire 17 minute and 58 second interview by clicking this link: http://media.libsyn.com/media/gsnyder/CiscoSystemsInterview.m4v

If you have iTunes installed you can watch and listen to this one, watch and listen to others, and subscribe to our video and audio podcasts by following this link: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=117349746

New York Times on Free Speech in China

On December 2, the New York Times published an editorial titled Yahoo Betrays Free Speech. The piece discussed how Yahoo helped the Chinese government find the identities of two Chinese journalists who both received ten years in jail for "disseminating pro-democracy writings".

Here's a quote from the editorial:

Yahoo’s collaboration is appalling, and Yahoo is not the only American company helping the Chinese government repress its people. Microsoft shut down a blogger at Beijing’s request. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft censor searches in China. Cisco Systems provided hardware used by Beijing to censor and monitor the Internet.

You may have seen the following YouTube piece on the Yahoo settlement (or something similar) last month:



I encourage you to read the New York Times editorial and watch the video clip - good classroom material for discussion from political, legal, business/financial and even technological (how do they do that?) perspectives.

New Federal Regulations will Have Impact On Open Source Wireless Devices

On July 6, 2007, new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations in the United States went into effect on devices that use software-defined radio (SDR) technologies. These devices include wireless access points, cell phones, PDA's, wireless network cards, etc. The FCC ruling will make it more difficult for manufacturers to get approval for these types of devices in this country. Accoring to the FCC the regulations are based primarily on safety and will attempt to stop users from doing things like modifying the source code of the devices to boost power or change frequencies of the devices.

Some of the most popular SDR devices among network savvy users on the market today are the Linksys WRT54G series wireless access points. These were the first, and still most popular, consumer devices to have their source code released, allowing users to make modifications and essentially "soup up" the performance of the router. There are numerous third party firmware projects for these devices with a good active list maintained on Wikipedia linked here. Currently the three most popular firmware replacements are Alchemy and Talisman produced by Sveasoft, and DD-WRT.

The Open Source WRT54G Story linked here, describes the history of the device and also describes how you can "turn a $60 router into a $600 router". Here's a couple of quotes from the article:

"While routers used to be the domain of networking specialists, they’ve gone mainstream along with residential broadband. Commodity routers can be had for as little as – well, "free after rebate” in some cases, and often not much more. To keep them cheap, consumer-grade vendors like Linksys repackage designs from OEM vendors rather than design the hardware and software in-house".

"The tradeoff for these sub-$100 routers can be reliability, particularly in the coding of the firmware – the software “brain” that controls the router’s functions. Consumer-grade firmware may be buggy, and may be limited in functionality compared to commercial-grade routers designed for business such as those made by Cisco and SonicWall".

This is very interesting - according to a piece on LinuxDevices.com linked here:

"A summary document published by the FCC suggests that the new regulations were actually proposed by Cisco, a vendor of wireless cards and other networking equipment. The summary document suggests that because of the new rules, SDR device vendors who use open-source software in certain capacities could face challenges getting FCC approval".

You can read the 2500 word FCC summary document linked here.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has responded with a white paper saying the the FCC has little regulation authority of hardware devices and the FCC is stifling software development with this regulation. The SFLC white paper is linked here.


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Listen to Mike Q and my latest podcast "One Week with the iPhone" linked here.