Cisco recently made available an interesting simulation game called myPlanNet. If you’ve played SimCity, as I’m sure most people are familiar with, you’d find some of the concepts similar. In myPlanNet, you are the CEO of a service provider, and what you do is to manage your business as it evolves through the different eras from primitive dial-up, through broadband and mobile connectivity, into the futuristic (although certainly not farfetched) medianet age.
The target audience for this game is quite different from that of SimCity. The background knowledge required is different. Although SimCity also requires you to know something about city planning, economics, etc, much of it is really common sense (at least for the kind of audience who would play SimCity).
In myPlanNet, you really need to know broad fundamentals on various network technologies, everything from data networking, mobile phone networks, broadband, etc. If not, then you had better have a great passion to learn about these things. Apart from just having fun, education seems to be the goal of myPlanNet, because there is plenty of explanations, tutorials, and illustrations. But, of course, if you are not interested in these things at all, you’re not going to like the game.
There are plenty of thing to learn. You’d see how service providers organize their infrastructure into core, aggregation and access layers. There are also edge layers as well as the “service delivery centre”. It’s not very different from how enterprise data networks are built. You’ll see what devices fit in where, and what devices are required to provision what kind of services. You’ll learn what sort of technologies lead to what opportunities, or basically what depends on what other things.
There are three starting points you can choose in the game: 1) As a landline telco; 2) As a cable TV company; 3) As a mobile phone operator. Whichever company type you begin with, you’d soon have to acquire technologies and build out services of the other type of companies which you didn’t choose to begin with, and ultimately continue progressing toward the same goal of reaching the medianet age.
The real life is not different. Look at the SingTel and StarHub (I hesitate to add M1). They both provide landline phones (although limited deployment for StarHub), digital voice, mobile, fixed and mobile broadband, pay TV, etc. Networks are converging, and whether you start out as a landline phone company or a cable TV company, you’d all end up doing the same thing.
There’s no StarHub or SingTel to compete with in this game. But I think the game will give you an appreciation of what StarHub and SingTel do behind-the-scenes and under-the-hood.
The game is not too challenging. Actually you would find it more difficult to go bankrupt (if at all possible) than with SimCity. My guess is that Cisco wants this to be an education tool. You aren’t going to learn a lot if you get stuck with economics, even though there are some simple economics that you have to manage.
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