Cisco Paints 5G Strategy Around Optics, Packet Core

Cisco plays in two of the three key areas that network operators have to address to facilitate the delivery of 5G service, said Jonathan Davidson, SVP of Cisco’s service provider networking business. Cisco plays in two of the three key areas that network operators have to address to facilitate the delivery of 5G service, said Jonathan Davidson, SVP of Cisco’s service provider networking business. “There’s three distinct decisions that need to be made with 5G,” he said at Barclay’s investor conference. The first is selecting a radio vendor, a market which Cisco is decidedly not a participant. In addition, however, operators need to build new backhaul infrastructure to carry 5G traffic and select a vendor to supply a 5G mobile network packet core. Both of those are “critical” components of a network operator’s 5G infrastructure, and Cisco is positioned to win business in both areas, Davidson said. “There’s too much bandwidth in a 5G radio to use your existing backhaul network in almost every scenario,” he said. Cisco is targeting that space with its routers and optics technology, a market it entered in 2010 with its CoreOptics acquisition, followed later by acquisitions of Lightwire, Luxtera, and most recently it’s $2.6 billion acquisition of Acacia. Cisco expects its deal with Acacia to close by the end of the year. The vendor shared details about its optics strategy during its “Internet for the Future” event in San Francisco this week, pledging that its optics will operate in Cisco, white box, and third-party vendors’ hosts. “Mobile backhaul is a routed and optical infrastructure” play for Cisco, Davidson explained. Cisco’s strategy for 5 mobile packet core is a pure software play, he added. Davidson noted that the 8000 Series router, which was also unveiled at the event, is well timed and positioned for network operator’s requirements for the mobile packet core. “When you have all of that traffic coming in to this backhaul infrastructure, it’s going to hit your IP core as well,” he said. “The Cisco 8000 is started at the IP core network, and we think it has a significant competitive advantage against anyone else in the industry with capacity, significant power savings, and we think it will help people accelerate their 5G deployments.” Savings on power, operations, and capital investments play heavily into Cisco’s strategy and underline how it hopes to earn more business with mobile network operators. “The challenge is that capex has been relatively flat” for a few years, which means that “a single dollar of capex today needs to do 11 times the work it did just a few years ago,” Davidson said. The “work” refers to the amount of bandwidth that operators need to carry on their networks. Cisco is also working to help service providers reduce operational costs by reducing the time between the release of Cisco products or services and actual operator deployments of that technology. Cisco releases new hardware or software every 12 to 18 months, and service providers generally spend up to 12 months testing before deploying that technology at scale, he explained. Cisco wants to help operators dramatically decrease that time to market and put them closer in line with its innovation cycle, Davidson said. “This is a problem we should be able to use the cloud for” by enabling customers to use a machine-learning algorithm developed by Cisco that will look at their entire network topology and determine what tests need to be done, he added. Those test plans can be built in a matter of minutes, according to Davidson. “Where we see technology going over time is that the different technology areas are going to become more and more tightly integrated over time from a systems perspective. And you need to have access to those pieces of seminal technology or it’s going to become very difficult for you to build the right products for the right markets,” Davidson explained. “This is one of the reasons why we’ve made the acquisitions that we made and announced the acquisition” of Acacia. “We helped build the first version of the internet, the internet gave birth to the cloud, and now we’re using the cloud to make the next version of the internet even better,” Davidson said.