Cisco’s Davidson: ‘We’re the Most Important 5G Vendor’

Cisco will play a critical role in 5G for network operators, Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president of Cisco’s service provider business, told SDxCentral in an interview at Cisco Live. “I believe we’re the most important 5G vendor in the world, and the reason for that is because we are the ones that are actually going to help [operators] monetize their 5G infrastructure,” he said. “I think we know the enterprise better than anyone.” Considering the high cost of deploying a 5G network, monetizing that new infrastructure continues to be top of mind among mobile operators. Without well-defined use cases and business models, operators will struggle to see a return on their 5G investments. Journey to 5G
But before that occurs, operators have three major decisions to make, according to Davidson. Vendors for radio access network equipment and the mobile packet core must be selected, and then operators have to rebuild their backhaul infrastructure to handle the capacity and bandwidth requirements of 5G, he explained. “We don’t see them happening completely in parallel, but certainly the 5G radio and the 5G packet core have to go together to some extent, because one without the other doesn’t make sense,” Davidson said, adding that Cisco has 40% market share in the mobile packet core space.