11 January 2024, Quezon City, Philippines - To jumpstart the series of IPv6 advocacy and capacity building under the APNIC Foundation/ ISIF Asia-funded project Open Network Testbed Laboratory for Internet Technologies Deployment and Experimentation (ON-IDLE), the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI) and the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), together with the Camarines Sur Polytechnic Colleges (CSPC), will come together to organize a Campus Network Design and Operations Workshop on January 15-18, 2024 at the CSPC campus. Participants to the workshop will learn about network design principles, physical infrastructure, fibre optics, switching, static routing, and IPv4/IPv6 and deploying dual stack infrastructure.  

Steve Huter, NSRC Director, shares that NSRC and ASTI’s collaboration spans nearly 20 years, working together to enhance research and education capabilities across the Philippines via technical training collaborations and network engineering engagements. Huter said, “working with the community of CSPC to start off 2024 is a great honor and we are happy about the opportunity. NSRC greatly appreciates the vision and leadership at the ASTI in advancing scientific expertise and inspiring us all to work together to improve food production, health systems, ecology, weather and climate knowledge, and technological efforts to improve economic and social benefits for the people.” 

ASTI Director Franz De Leon recalls that the last time ASTI and NSRC partnered for such an activity was in October 2014, with the University of the Philippines as local host, and UP Los Banos and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) participating as well. De Leon enthuses, “we are honored to work with them again on this project, through our partnership with CSPC.” He further adds, “I would like to thank CSPC for taking the initiative on this partnership, with this being our first MOA to be signed under the ISIF Asia-funded project ON-IDLE. We look forward to the activities with CSPC and hope that this is just the start of more opportunities for collaboration with them, and we are excited to be working with NSRC on this.” 

CSPC, as a primary project partner, opens its campus to host other academic institutions in the greater Bicol region. CSPC President Amado Oliva, Jr. welcomes the activity as a strategic partnership with ASTI and CSPC in terms of technology transfer through academic collaboration. He says, “through this workshop, CSPC will have the honored role of being the host of a transformative activity that can potentially have an impact in terms of building a better internet for the Bicol region.” The skills that will be gained by the participants will enable them to deploy in their respective campus networks tools and technologies that would improve organizational network performance, security and reliability, that will improve the overall Internet experience of their students, faculty, and other users. 

This work is supported by a grant from the APNIC Foundation, via the ISIF Asia. Visit their online platforms: 

• Facebook: @ISIF.asia, @APNICFoundation 
• Twitter / X: @ISIF_Asia, @ApnicFoundation
• Linkedin: @apnic-foundation 

#ISIFAsia2023 #ON-IDLE