Cisco has recently entered the video game market…sort of.  myPlanNet can be found at the link.  The game is a Sim City type RTS (real-time strategy) simulation game that places you at the center of the early 1990′s when public knowledge of the Internet is extremely limited.

You start the game as head of a new service provider in the “Dial-up Era”.  And it is your goal to make infrastructure decisions to expand the reach of your services, keep your customers happy and stay in business.  Your decisions affect success multipliers that result in a “happiness index” of your customers.  Success moves you on to the “Broadband Era,” the “Mobile Connected Life,” and ultimately into the “Medianet Age”.

I started the game as Hownowbrowncow Communications (yes that was a shameless plug for my @hownowbrowncow twitter account).  You then have the choice to begin life as a CEO over either a landline phone company, a cable TV company, or a cell phone/pager company.  I personally chose cable TV as is seemed like a decent middle ground of stats to begin.

As the tutorial describes, there are basically 4 steps to the game:

1. Connect your population
2. Buy network equipment
3. Price and turn on your services
4. Discover new technologies with your profits

I started my game by first making my current available subscribers happy by providing coaxial connection to all of them, and then immediately began researching fiber technologies.  This gave me access to SONET/SDH.  Strangely enough I had to still go back and research copper wire technology to move forward in my goal of providing landline telephone system to compete with the local DSL.   And then to move onto the Broadband era I had to research wireless and analog cellular systems.  I definitely had a happy customer index but the research alone had taken $6 million of my $15 million start up capital and I was losing $400k a month.

The realities of this type of operation begin to sink in.  And those of us who are not engineers will greatly appreciate the explanations provided within the game of everything we are researching and implementing.

After hooking up my unhappy customers with copper and cellular access, I was down to $5 million.  However, I got a smiley face icon that told me the local family would be able to have family movie night this weekend. Which sure made my $500k loses per month at this point seem less drastic.

In the end I made it to April 1991 and was informed after my bankruptcy that, “It’s a hard NOC life.”

I have personally learned a lot from my experience with this game.  Namely, if you ignore Step 3 and don’t go to “Service Operations” and turn on your additional services that you have researched you like me will become another busted dot.com CEO.  After this discovery, and advancing 3 more months into the game, I finally began pulling down some profits.  But I still have a long way to go before I make up for my $5 million in losses from my error.

While myPlanNet isn’t real life, and the choices you need to make to succeed are rather simple, the game certainly opens your eyes up to the problems that ISP’s face in their journey to become successful.  The biggest irritation of the whole thing was Cisco forcing you to sign up for an account to download.

But if you can get over that little hurdle, be sure to come back and let us know how you did!