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Cisco Live Show builds hope for digital innovators [Arab News (Saudi Arabia)](Arab News (Saudi Arabia) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Cisco Live Show 2013 kicked off in London with a huge participation of experts, companies, educational institutions, health care organizations and enterprises. The show aims to set the agenda for the future of technology and business, and to discover new world of technical possibilities. The event, which offers a unique combination of technical education, training and cutting-edge insight, was held at ICC London ExCeL from Jan. 29 to Feb. 1 where a preconference technical seminar was held on Jan. 28. The four-day event gathered network and system engineers, technical individual contributions, business managers, IT directors, IT architects, and senior IT leaders. The first day of the event was crammed with technical seminars and Cisco certification testing to showcase Cisco's vision to improve Britain's enterprise, smart cities and innovation ecosystem. Cisco UK CEO Phil Smith spoke about the successful experience of last summer's Olympic Games in London. Smith indicated that their goal is to establish an environment in which start-up businesses and their ideas "can flourish." He said: "With the emergence of Tech City, there is a need to focus on cultivating a new wave of tech and digital communities in the UK and putting Britain at the forefront of technology innovation. Cisco, like many other organizations, has already realized the importance of British innovation and entrepreneurship to support the government's goal of driving economic growth through hi-tech innovation and start to providing opportunities for entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to expand and develop within the Tech City area and beyond." According to Smith, Cisco believes there is still a lot of work to be done to take entrepreneurship and British innovation to the next level. "As the official Network Infrastructure provider to the London 2012 Olympic Games, our focus has been on helping to build a brilliant future for Britain by creating initiatives that have a long term contribution to the UK. Cisco believes that driving initiatives will speed up the development growth. Our main goal for the next five years is to develop Britain's innovation ecosystem and create an environment in which start-up digital businesses and their ideas can flourish," he said. According to Smith, the UK has a great opportunity to start a new generation of entrepreneurism. "There is no reason why the next Google or Twitter can't come from the UK. With one of the world's strongest digital markets and the ICT, software and digital content sectors worth 100 billion pounds combined, we can really put Britain at the forefront of technology innovation. We believe that together with the government and other partners we can truly help inspire the minds of the entrepreneurs of today and build a brilliant future for Britain," he said. Opening the first day of Cisco live show 2013, Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco, confirmed that their vision is for the network to solve three differentials experience differential, velocity differential, and data differential. "Cisco's further strategy is to create a model for the next generation IT to become the first ranked IT company. Our tools to reach this goal are the following: Open source Ecosystem, business processes and enterprise applications, industry solutions, and Cisco video and collaboration," she said. During Cisco London Show 2013 the company released two main devices where Inbar Lasser-Raab, director of enterprise mobility at Cisco, talked in detail about these new devices. The first issued device is called Doubles for LTE duties. The Aironet 3600 AP has four antennas, giving more reliability, to the three spatial streams (data channels) that it can set up between itself and a client device. It also has a slot for modules to be added, the first will be a network scanning probe using the same antennas. "This access point is 30 percent faster than rival devices. Although other devices from vendors such as Aruba can manage three spatial streams of data between access point and client - an ability allowed by the 802.11n MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) standard - the addition of a fourth antenna will allow an additional range, and more reliability at longer range, helping the batteries of mobile devices to last longer," she added. "It's like having four ears to listen with and four mouths to talk with," said Lasser-Raab. "The access point is based on Cisco's own silicon, instead of industry-standard chips. We work on our own RF chips we are not picking up off-the-shelf chips." As well as the extra antenna, the 3600 has an intriguing expansion slot. "Customers are looking to protect future investments," said Lasser-Raab. "They can install modules in the field." The second released devices are called Mysterious modules. What modules these will be a little mysterious. The AP was handed around with an RF monitor module, which will be available by the end of the year. This uses the existing antennas to turn the AP into a dual-purpose AP and radio network probe, looking for performance issues and security breaches. More possible modules could be for other radio technologies such as 3G and LTE on licensed spectrum, providing indoor hotspots or "femtocells." Lasser-Raab admitted this might be a possibility but refused to comment, except to suggest that further announcements might be made at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month. The new AP got a glowing report from Thomas Vogel, local area network manager at the Technical University of Darmstadt, who has updated a university-wide network from earlier Cisco APs, to support 25,000 students who all have multiple devices. At Cisco Live, about 6,000 people with multiple devices were able to bring the show's Wi-Fi network to its knees. Cisco staff assured TechWeekEurope that it was working, but we shifted to 3G hotspot software on our phone. The Aironet 3600 AP is available now for $ 1,495 (947 pounds), or $ 1,595 (1,011 pounds) for a version where the antennas are external and can be angled independently. (c) 2013 Arab News All rights reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |