Cisco will help provide network architecture education to students as part of a new post-graduate course to be offered at the University of New South Wales (UNSW).
Targeted at challenging a potential skills shortage in qualified network engineers in the face of projects like the National Broadband Network (NBN), the Network Systems Architecture course was co-developed by Cisco and UNSW's School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications. The course will tackle topics such as systems-level architecture required for applications such as e-commerce, data centres and cloud computing.
The 13-week course, which begins for the first time on 22 July, will see students receive lectures from Cisco engineers and collaborate on real-world case studies in the NBN as well as cloud computing and mobile netnworks.
Professor Eliathamby Ambikairajah, head of the UNSW school, said students already learnt about networking methods and technologies. However, he said they were largely taught in isolation from each other, and students lacked the the ability to integrate that knowledge in designing, analysing and verifying systems to addressed requirements and possible expansion.
"This is actually going to fill the gap, and also give a good opportunity for our students to learn in overall systems architecture where it will connect the engineering and design to the business organisation," he said.
The course has an intake of 50 students, with 24 students having signed up over 10 days at the time of announcement.
“Unfortunately, we have found a lack of sufficient industry training to address these important trends," Cisco Australia and New Zealand's chief technical officer, Kevin Bloch, said in a statement.
"We found this was a very important course, not only to collaborate with UNSW, but also for students to immediately be relevant and apply their knowledge to the industry as they step out of this course.
"It's based on what we're seeing in the telecommunications environment and in the enterprise networking environment."
The announcement comes a month after Huawei partnered with RMIT University in Melbourne to deliver training to up to 500 students in Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless broadband and Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technologies over three years. Huawei also signalled a potential to expand education to a further 1500 students through agreements with other universities.
Huawei and Cisco as well as Alcatel-Lucent's research arm, Bell Labs, all partner with the University of Melbourne's Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES), which studies the various effects of fast, ubiquitous broadband like the NBN, as well as ways to reduce the carbon footprint for telecommunications. IBES and Bell Labs also form part of the GreenTouch initiative, which looks at ways to cut the Internet's greenhouse emissions, which recently opened its doors to more members.