News Release

TANet Deploy Cisco's Technology to Build Asia's Largest Metropolitan-Area Network for Education

Cisco Catalyst Switches Selected for Taiwan's Largest Academic IPv6 Network
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Feb 21, 2003

TAIPEI - February 21, 2003 - Taiwan Academic Network (TANet) has chosen Cisco Systems technology to build Asia's largest academic metropolitan-area network (MAN). As TANet's second network to be built primarily with Cisco technology, the MAN will allow better resource sharing among schools and institutes.

TANet's new MAN will stimulate the use of the Internet for education while delivering more bandwidth, better network security, and greater mobile access to students and teachers. It will also be easier for network administrators to manage.

Using Cisco Catalyst® 6509 and Catalyst 3550-12T switches, TANet's MAN will be the largest Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) network in Taiwan. The network will connect 12 regional networks to create a powerful information highway solely for academic use.

The deployment will directly benefit more than six million users from Taiwan's educational and research institutes. It will also help the Taiwanese government to complete the most critical information project under its e-Taiwan initiative, which aims to make Taiwan a thoroughly computerised society.

"Our mission is to construct an information environment and promote networked education for Taiwan. At the same time, we continue to strive for a solution that can cope with future network trends," said Chen Kim-joan, director of the Computer Center, Ministry of Education, Taiwan Academic Network. "The scalability and high availability provided by Cisco's network technology will enable us to offer advanced educational tools like distance learning and multimedia. Our goal is that all schools and research institutes will ultimately share mutual resources and achieve greater collaboration."

"We first worked with Cisco in 2001. This latest MAN project represents our further joint efforts to help boost IT education in Taiwan. Our cooperation also demonstrates our active involvement in the government's ongoing e-Taiwan initiative," Chen added.

Larry Chai, general manager of Cisco Systems Taiwan said, "Cisco's commitment to education is shown by the Cisco Networking AcademyTM Program and our extensive efforts to promote e-learning."

"We are glad to once again collaborate with TANet to build the largest MAN for Asia's academic sector. By this close collaboration, we will achieve a major milestone in launching IPv6, a critical component for the e-Taiwan initiative. We can also offer a network platform with the highest speed and security for Taiwan's research and educational users," he added.

IPv6 is the next-generation protocol designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an open community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of Internet architecture. Intended to replace the current IP version 4 (IPv4), IPv6 offers larger capacity for IP addresses, safer mobile Internet access, higher quality of service (QoS), improved efficiency, and optimisation for network traffic. IPv6 addresses problems caused by network congestion, such as the limited number of available IPv4 addresses.

TANet's deployment of Cisco technology has maximised the potential of the combination of IPv6 and Cisco Catalyst 6509 and Catalyst 3550-12T switches.

The Cisco Catalyst 6509 Switch delivers high-performance, multilayer switching technology for campus networks. The switch is designed for server-aggregation environments. It addresses the increased requirements for gigabit scalability, high-availability and multilayer switching in backbone/branch networks.

The Catalyst 6509 switch provides a wide range of multicast applications that allow group sharing of bandwidth, as well as mission-critical data and voice applications. Coupled with the Cisco IOS® Software, the Catalyst 6509 can further support the architecture required to handle high-density gigabit switching and multilayer intelligence for network transmission management.