SAN DIEGO — 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.

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.

“There also is a decent amount of customization that happens at the mobile pocket core because the service provider wants to offer a set of unique services to differentiate themselves from other mobile operators,” he said.

Through that process Cisco wants to help service providers resolve three fundamental challenges: address the challenge of agility, give operators the ability to extend policies from enterprise to mobile infrastructure, and bring more transparency to what’s happening inside the infrastructure, Davidson explained.

The vendor also wants to help operators define use cases for specific verticals so it can package features and requirements for enterprises in the most efficient manner possible. For example, when network slicing comes along, Davidson doesn’t expect operators to sell it a slice. Instead it will be sold as private 5G infrastructure suited for a particular vertical or application, he said.

“Because they use slicing as the underlying technology is almost irrelevant. It’s the use cases that matter — that’s the business value,” Davidson said. “We definitely are working very closely with service providers and enterprises to help define what those use cases are because there’s so many you’ve got to pick and choose which ones you think are going to be the most impactful.”

Network operators also have to be careful about overexposing the network and creating unnecessary confusion and complexity for enterprises, he said. “You don’t want to offer too many options for anything. People get option overload.”