Networks Analyzed @ Netralized

Cisco systems has announced changes in the course material and the certification path of the CCNA exam.

First of all, the CCNA exam was constituted from two different courses INTRO and ICND. Now, Cisco has replaced the INTRO (32 hours) course with ICND 1 (40 hours) course and the ICND has been replaced by ICND 2 (40 hours) course.

The course materials and the changes – or should I say the updates that Cisco made – are: ICND 1 has almost the same topics with INTRO. Exception is Module 3 that is an introduction of wireless networking.

In the list below you can see analytically all the topics of ICND 1.

Module 1 – Building a Simple Network
Module 2 – Ethernet Local Area Networks
Module 3 – Wireless Local Area Networks
Module 4 – Exploring the Functions of Routing
Module 5 – Wide Area Networks
Module 6 – Network Environment Management

The ICND 2 course has a few changes compared to ICND. The topics about ISDN are completely removed, and instead Cisco has added topics about Wireless, VoIP, IPv6, VPN, SSH and configuration examples using the Cisco SDM. Again, analytically the modules of the course are:

Module 1 – Small Network Implementation
Module 2 – Medium-Sized Switched Network Construction
Module 3 – Medium-Sized Routed Network Construction
Module 4 – Single Area OSPF Implementation
Module 5 – EIGRP Implementation
Module 6 – Access Control Lists
Module 7 – Address Space Management
Module 8 – LAN Extension to a WAN

I believe that the changes that Cisco has made are necessary, especially after the update of CCNP. Now the students have a more “smooth” learning path from CCNA to CCNP. Why? Because major topics of CCNP such as wireless, VoIP, VPN and IPv6 are now introduced in CCNA giving them a brief “flavor” of what’s coming up next.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Cisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.