Cisco doesn’t participate in mobile phones or radio access network (RAN) infrastructure, the most lucrative sectors of the wireless industry, but it touches almost everything else, according to Jonathan Davidson, EVP and GM of Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group.

“Mobile networks aren’t mobile for very long. They have to get to a wired infrastructure,” and therein lies multiple roles for Cisco to play in the telco arena, he said during an interview hosted by Raymond James that was broadcast from MWC Barcelona 2022.

Cisco’s opportunity in the telco space includes the buildout of new backhaul and metro infrastructure to handle increased capacity and bandwidth, its IoT Control Center, private networks, and the core of mobile network infrastructure. 

“We continue to be a market leader in that space,” Davidson said, referring to Cisco’s 4G LTE and 5G network core products. More than a billion wireless subscribers are connected to Cisco’s 4G LTE core, and it plays a central role on T-Mobile’s 5G standalone core, which serves more than 100 million subscribers on a converged 4G LTE and 5G core, he added.

Cisco also expects opportunities to broaden around private networks, an area it more formally entered recently with the announcement of Cisco Private 5G.

The concept of private networks running on cellular spectrum isn’t new — about 400 private 4G LTE networks exist today — but Cisco expects “significantly more than that in the 5G world,” Davidson said. “We think that in conjunction with the additional capacity or also the need for high-value asset tracking is really important.”

Moreover, he added, there isn’t much difference between a private 5G service and fixed wireless access from a technology perspective, and that’s another 5G development Cisco is targeting. 

Davidson also explained how Cisco sees its role evolving in full stack observability pointing to its estimated $1 billion acquisition of ThousandEyes in 2020, despite the fact many enterprises still purchase single-point products or services.

“I think people are just in the last 12 to 24 months realizing that there is a broader problem that needs to be solved, and that is the disaggregation of the application,” he said.

In a multi-cloud environment, it’s not just the application on a mobile device, but rather “all of the capabilities behind it, and it’s been very challenging in the past to decompose and understand where the challenges might have been,” Davidson explained. 

Going forward, Cisco doesn’t expect application developers to be network experts, he added. “They’re not today, they’re not going to be. What we need to be able to do is help them narrow down very rapidly what the challenges are so they can fix the problem.”

This includes more convergence and adoption of automation instruments, but also a push to make networks more driven by APIs, he explained. 

Davidson also expects Cisco’s flattened infrastructure, or routed optical networking, to gain momentum in wireless networks. But first, a definition. For Cisco, optical refers to the technology that moves bits from point A to point B, not optical transceivers. 

“Our belief is there is going to be a transition in the market towards what we call routed optical networking. And this means that takes traditional transponders and moves them from being a shelf, or a separate box, or a device, and turns them into a pluggable optic, which you then plug into a router,” he said. 

This is where Cisco’s $4.5 billion acquisition of Acacia Communications comes into play.

The second phase of this type of network transformation involves the replacement of modems that exist in optical infrastructure with routers that carry pluggable transponders, Davidson added. The third phase places private line emulation onto that same infrastructure.

“Radio access networks themselves are between $30 billion and $40 billion a year. Depending on who you talk to, optical can be between $10 billion and $15 billion a year. And then routing is below $10 a year,” he said. 

“Our belief is that the optical total addressable market will start to shift over time as routed optical networks become more prevalent, because it will move from the optical domain into the optic transceiver market,” Davidson added.

Finally, although Cisco repeatedly insists it has no interest in becoming a RAN supplier, it remains strongly supportive of open RAN. The RAN market “is still closed, it’s locked in, even though there are standards,” he said. 

“People do not do any interoperability testing between vendors, which is fundamentally changing with open RAN” because operators are forcing vendors to make their equipment interoperate with open RAN implementations, Davidson said.