Mobile network operators that didn’t make 5G technology decisions before 2020 have effectively lost an entire year’s worth of progress due to COVID-19, according to Cisco’s Jonathan Davidson.

Delayed spectrum auctions, permitting, technology evaluations, and testing have all been delayed by about nine to 12 months due to the ongoing global pandemic, Davidson, the SVP and GM of Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure unit, said at an investor conference today.

These delays are impacting the vast majority of operators because relatively few got their 5G efforts underway before 2020 quickly unraveled. 

“If you already made your technology decision, and if you are on the path of deployment, there were minor hiccups in the beginning but that’s been mostly proceeding at pace,” Davidson said at the Credit Suisse Technology Conference. “But the majority of the world have not yet made their technology decisions for mobile core or for backhaul, so there’s a little bit of a push out from that perspective.” 

Left unsaid, of course, is a troubling resurgence of COVID-19 infections across much of the world that could delay operators’ 5G aspirations much longer than a year. There’s no guarantee that 2021 will bring any relief, and most public health officials warn that things will continue to worsen before the situation improves — hopefully in the second half of next year. 

Meanwhile, Cisco’s early movement in virtualization and its adoption of microservices and cloud-native technology for the mobile core is boosting the vendor’s confidence and it’s banked some early wins among operators that approached 5G more aggressively prior to this year of calamity.

On the mobile core front, Cisco has “had tremendous wins here in the U.S. We’ve been public with T-Mobile, which is the first provider in the U.S. to have a 5G SA (standalone) core, so some people refer to it as having real 5G deployments here in the U.S. across a broad swath of the entire country,” Davidson said. 

Cisco has also snagged some 5G mobile core contracts with operators in Western Europe and Asia, according to Davidson, but he declined to name those carriers. 

He also commented on the market-wide shifts underway during the run-up to 5G and explained that Cisco is migrating from a virtualized radio access network (RAN) framework to an open RAN environment to strengthen its position. “There’s a lot of layers in that space [and] we’ve been investing heavily to build an end-to-end ecosystem to further drive this open RAN environment forward,” he said. 

“This is one of the areas that has been slightly delayed a bit by COVID because of the need to not only test in your labs, but get these out into a live network” so operators can confirm it meets performance requirements, Davidson explained. 

Cisco hasn’t publicly revealed plans to do so thus far, but an acquisition or series of acquisitions would be the most direct path for the company to expand its role as a potential supplier of more pervasive open RAN gear and software. 

Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst at Recon Analytics, recently told SDxCentral that Cisco is the most obvious company to make a stronger push into the RAN market by riding on the wave of open RAN excitement. He specifically called out Mavenir as an open RAN vendor with the most broad portfolio and named Airspan as another potential target. 

“What we’ve seen over the last nine months is a continued and growing amount of interest in the market for open RAN based deployments. This is why we continue to invest in bringing together this entire ecosystem,” Davidson said.

“We’re seeing it move from kind of greenfield only to those providers that already have a large amount of infrastructure out there. So our play continues to be the orchestration layer, continue to drive the ecosystem, transport, as well as that automation layer to help bring this forward,” he said, adding that Cisco is “engaging in multiple accounts” on that effort.