Academy track

Networking

Three courses across the OSI stack. NET-101 builds the packet-analysis muscle most students never get; NET-201 walks the production routing and switching every networking engineer touches; NET-301 takes the student to carrier and datacenter scale. The track interleaves with the RE track on protocol-RE labs and the PT track on lateral-movement labs.

3 courses ยท 1 ready All tracks → Filter to Networking on the index →
VCA-NET-101 Belt 3/5
Ready / EnrollCompTIA Network+Cisco CCST Networking

Networks and Packet Analysis

10th Grade Spring

OSI and TCP/IP, Wireshark, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, Python sockets. Students learn to see what's actually on the wire. Capstone: documented home-network map with traffic analysis.

~93 hr
Prereq: VCA-FND-102
Equipment: None (laptop-only; Wireshark + free tooling)
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VCA-NET-201 Belt 3/5
Coming soonCisco CCNA-track

Intermediate Networking

Part-II Networking-Track Anchor

Switching (VLAN, STP, trunking) on multi-router GNS3 lab topologies; routing protocols (OSPF, BGP); modern data-plane primitives. Cross-cuts to RE-track network-protocol RE, PT-track lateral-movement, and the embedded-networking arc.

~145 hr
Prereq: VCA-NET-101 + VCA-CSA-101
Equipment: Laptop + GNS3 lab (free Cisco/Juniper trial images); optional: Tang Primer 25K from CSA-101
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VCA-NET-301 Belt 5/5
Coming soonCisco CCNP-track

Advanced Networking

Part-II Networking-Track Capstone

Carrier/WAN protocols (MPLS, SR, SRv6), datacenter fabrics (VXLAN-EVPN), Internet-scale BGP, network automation, eBPF/XDP, Suricata clustering + Zeek pipelines, network forensics, modern protocols (HTTP/3, WebTransport), wireless deep-dive. Caps the academy networking track.

~165 hr
Prereq: VCA-NET-201 + VCA-CSA-201
Equipment: Laptop + GNS3 / containerlab; optional FPGA from CSA-201 for the network-data-path lab
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