The COVID-19 crisis and economic doldrums caused by the pandemic is causing delays in 5G, Cisco executives recently told SDxCentral. The software and hardware vendor was working with 30 customers on active 5G deployments as recently as last month, but it’s bracing for delays to spread through the remainder of 2020.

“There’s certainly an impact here in the short term, and I think longer term there are going to be impacts,” Bob Everson, senior director of 5G architecture at Cisco, told SDxCentral during a recent phone interview. 

Some argue or hope that countries ravaged by this pandemic will accelerate investments in 5G to drive economic recoveries, but there aren’t any clear signs that’s happening yet, Everson said. “This could actually accelerate some of the plans when we get a little bit further down the road” in 2021, he said, adding that the demand for 5G technologies remains high despite ongoing and widespread challenges.

“It’s too early to know if this is going to increase adoption or slow it down,” but the pandemic has underlined the need for industries and service providers to be better prepared to confront calamity with more robust infrastructure, Everson explained.

“It’s going to be interesting to see over the next three to six months, as we see what happens with the pandemic and as we see what happens in the business climate,” he added. “I think we’ll see more focus on cost savings and how [operators and enterprises] can do this with less, which drives more demand for automation. I think that’s a natural change that we’re going to see.”

Cisco, for its part, is targeting three primary domains it considers crucial for operators and service providers to successfully transition to 5G: the standalone (SA) 5G core, transport infrastructure, and, to a lesser extent, the radio access network (RAN) via Cisco’s open RAN orchestration software.

These decisions and activities aren’t always made in parallel or on the same timeline, explained Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM at Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure group. 

“More often than not, they're making one domain decision before the other. Typically, what we have seen is in different parts of the world they may start investing in the physical transport network first, so the optical domain and the IP domain, because they happen to be at a refresh cycle,” he said. 

“We have customers who might be two years away from 5G but they are at the end of life of their existing deployment, and so they are not going to put in one network now and put another network in three years when they're ready to roll out 5G,” Davidson said. “You need all three. You need the mobile core, you need the radio network, and you need the converged SDN transport infrastructure in parallel. So anytime you’ve seen somebody go very big with their 5G messaging and they say that it’s available across a whole region or across an entire country that means that they have done all three in parallel.”

Regional or market-specific 5G deployments are indications that operators are deploying “kind of a piecemeal at a time,” Davidson added.