[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) -- The teams from China, Australia and Singapore were declared winners at the prestigious annual Cisco Asia Pacific NetRiders 2012 skills competition held by the Cisco Networking Academy™. As the first- and second-placed winners, the teams from China and Australia won all-expenses-paid trips to the United States.

Cisco APAC NetRiders 2012 was one of the largest real-time video competitions ever held in Asia, with students from 17 countries participating simultaneously over four hours using Cisco TelePresence® and Cisco WebEx®. Using these technologies in education provides an interactive experience, enhances the classroom learning and motivates young people to further pursue technology education and training.

The winners of the APAC NetRiders 2012 competition are Zhengzhong Wang and Jian Zhang from the Wenzhou University in China.

In second and third place were teams from Australia‘s Lidcombe College of TAFE and Singapore’s Nanyang Polytechnic.

Team Australia included Rajeev Khettry and Elise Marrott, and Ming Hong Kwek and Renhe Joshua Sim represented Singapore's Nanyang Polytechnic.

The annual competition is an opportunity for Networking Academy® students to participate in a valuable learning experience by testing their skills in the area of computer network hardware design, configuration, development, and maintenance, all of which are covered in the Networking Academy curriculum. To date, more than 16,000 Networking Academy students have competed in NetRiders events in more than 80 countries across the globe.

The competition involves two levels of testing. The first is a theoretical exam, and the second is an online network configuration through a computer simulation test using Packet Tracer 5.3