Cisco gets in on 5G action, including 5G private wireless

Jonathan Davidson was named SVP and general supervisor of Cisco's Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group in March 2020. From that point forward, he's driven the gathering that forms silicon, optics, equipment and programming for Cisco's biggest organization clients. As a component of that, his gathering additionally oversees Cisco's 5G ambitions.

Talking at a virtual occasion a week ago, Davidson noticed that Cisco was engaged with aiding T-Mobile set up its 5G independent (SA) center, which T-Mobile reported in August 2020.

“Cisco was a big part of helping that transition,” said Davidson. For T-Mobile, Cisco provided technology for user plane function, session management function and policy control function.

He said 5G offers Cisco a chance to help its clients move from inheritance apparatus based models to cloud-local virtualized foundations as they update their center organizations.

Although Cisco was slow to embrace disaggregated infrastructure, the company is on board with it now, driven by demand from its customers. “Generally, appliances are upgraded every 6, 12 or 18 months,” Davidson said. “We have customers using our cloud-native technology that are doing upgrades once or twice a week. And I cannot overemphasize the capabilities of cloud-native technologies as it relates to every aspect of network infrastructure, but especially inside of the mobile network.”