The U.S. government should stay out of the 5G investment business, said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on his company’s second-quarter fiscal 2020 earnings call.

Also on the call, Cisco executives reported another quarter of double-digit declines in service provider sales.

Cisco has “spent a lot of time educating different folks in Washington about what technologies actually constitute an entire 5G network,” Robbins said, adding that U.S. companies are “in really good shape.”

“We have packet core, we’ve got cell-site radio backhaul, we’ve got the IP routing core, we’ve got security,” Robbins continued. And while radio access network (RAN) technology from U.S. companies isn’t as developed as that of, say, Huawei, Robbins said U.S. operators can buy these components from vendors in Scandinavia and South Korean.

“There’s a couple of companies in Europe; one in South Korea that provide the radio technology,” Robbins said. He didn’t name these companies, but he’s talking about Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung. “There’s also software players that are out there right now, and they’re building disaggregated open ran solutions that can be used in the future.” Again, not naming names, but Cisco is heavily involved in open and virtualized RAN efforts as well as infrastructure and software to support operators’ 5G rollouts.

“We have early wins on IP infrastructure to support 5G rollouts in over 30 customers around the world,” Robbin said. “Some of those are cell site aggregation backhaul, some are core wins. Most of them are in non-standalone, which means they're enhancing their current networks.”

When it comes to the bigger 5G picture, “I actually think the U.S. is in fine shape, both from a carrier deployment perspective … And I think we’re in good position with the technology,” Robbins continued. “I don’t think the US government should make investments in these companies.”

But despite U.S. operators and equipment vendors being in fine shape — presumably, Cisco included — double-digit declines in service provider sales continued to plague Cisco earnings. The vendor reported an 11% drop in service provider revenue in the second quarter of its fiscal 2020.

In fact, all of Cisco’s customer segments declined over the quarter, with the exception of the public sector, which remained flat. Enterprise revenue dropped 7% compared to last year, and commercial fell 4%.

Overall, Cisco posted a 4% year-over-year drop in total revenue, to $12 billion, with product revenue down 6% and service revenue up 5%. Cisco’s two largest business segments — infrastructure platforms and applications — both fell 8% year over year. Security, up 9%, shone as the one bright spot for Cisco product revenue.

Still, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins sounded positive on an earnings call with investors, describing the revenue declines as “longer decision-making cycles across our customer segments.” He blamed this, in part, on macro uncertainty and “unique geographical issues.” But, Robbins noted, some of these issues like Brexit, and the U.S.-China trade talks marched toward a positive resolution during the quarter.

While Cisco expects revenue to continue to decline slightly in Q3 — its guidance suggests between a 1.5% and 3.5% drop year over year — “I firmly believe we have a tremendous opportunity ahead of us,” Robbins said. “The long-term secular growth trends of 5G, WiFi 6, 400G, and the shift to the cloud remain, and we expect to benefit from them. This is a multi-year transformation.”

Robbins said new initiatives, like the Cisco Silicon One and 8000 router platform announced in December will help with this multi-year transformation, and they show the investment that Cisco is pumping into its service provider business. “We have about five years of R&D effort in what we announced in December, so that’s. a lot of commitment to the market,” he said.

Cisco Silicon One is a new programmable silicon architecture that the vendor claims can serve anywhere in the network and be used in any form factor. And the 8000 router is built on Silicon One.

On the earnings call, Robbins reiterated the company’s pledge that the silicon will operate in white boxes and that Cisco will also sell its silicon directly to customers.

Cisco worked with Google Cloud to develop the new silicon, and at the December launch event said STC, a telecom services provider in the Middle East and Northern Africa, is the first customer to deploy the 8000 Series routers. The platform is also in trials with Comcast and NTT Communications.

“Across the cloud titans, we are engaged with all of them on variations of those architectures,” Robbins said on the earnings call. “We have taken orders for both from different players. And so we feel good about the acceptance of that launch. The 8000 series will be a fundamental backbone product for 5g networks.”