Cisco Maps IP-led Path to 5G Profitability with New Mobility Solutions

Cisco has announced new mobility solutions aimed to help service providers drive revenue and profitability from their 5G infrastructure.

As 5G preparation takes over, service providers are facing pressures to transform their networks to accommodate the oncoming traffic growth. According to the Cisco Annual Internet Report, there will be nearly 30 billion connected devices by 2023, nearly half of those will be mobile. Global 5G connections will be more than 10 percent of these total mobile connections.

Service providers are focused on how to grow profitability and show return on investment from their network buildouts. Cisco is focused on delivering the critical foundation that begins where the radio ends, including the converged IP ‘multi-haul’ network, packet core and mobile/cloud-native core along with a horizontal layer of automation, trust and security.

“The path to profitable 5G for service providers requires thoughtful choices on the mobile infrastructure with a cloud-native core, trustworthy IP network, and an open radio approach,” said Jonathan Davidson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Service Provider Business. “The ability to capitalize on 5G opportunities in the enterprise, IOT, data center and security domains is a game changer. Cisco is the innovation leader on mass-scale architectures and cross-domain solutions that enable service providers to grow revenue, reduce costs, and mitigate risk. We are focused on helping our customers navigate the path to profitable 5G and supporting those needs with financing options and flexible business models that make sense for today’s global economy.”

As the company continues working with its customers on 5G rollouts around the world, it has responded with unique additions to its portfolio featuring new software, hardware and flexible business models designed to support service providers’ needs for the Internet for the Future.

“The path to realizing the potential of 5G brings new technologies, software-centric deployment models, and revamped operational and business processes for mobile network operators to deliver new services to consumer and enterprise markets,” said Heidi Adams, Executive Director, Network Infrastructure Research, Omdia. “With Cisco’s introduction of new high-performance router platforms for mobile transport, cloud-native enhancements to its mobile core portfolio, and unique funding and revenue sharing models, operators can more easily take advantage of what 5G has to offer.”

Introducing Cisco Cloud Services Stack for Mobility

To help reduce the headaches associated with integrating multi-vendor “telco stacks” of hardware, software and services capabilities, Cisco has designed a common foundation that allows for agility and growth at scale with minimal disruption.

The new Cisco Cloud Services Stack for Mobility is a cloud-based mobile packet core solution that accelerates implementation of 4G and 5G mobility services, reduces integration costs and overall networking complexity. It offers a carrier-grade NFVI platform that is pre-integrated, pre-validated, and embedded with security, automation and assurance capabilities, running on Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus fabric. It is deployed and supported through Cisco Customer Experience.

“A critical element for accelerating 5G deployments is the need for the right skills and experience to address complex solution integrations,” said Dave Malik, Cisco Fellow and Chief Architect, Cisco Customer Experience. “The current climate of diverse technology stacks requires engineering expertise across multiple domains to drive seamless interoperability at scale. The Cisco Customer Experience team has the knowledge gained from working with global service providers to accelerate lifecycle management and large mobility deployments, helping customers speed time-to-value and capture market share.”

Introducing Cisco Cloud Services Stack for Content Delivery

5G services will require lower latency and much more bandwidth. Cisco’s Annual Internet Report shows that a 5G connection will generate up to three times more traffic than a 4G connection. For high bandwidth services like AR, VR and IoT services to thrive, it is best to be as close to the end user or “edge” as possible. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) enables service providers to create a “service edge” at the last mile of their networks enabling better experiences. These can be delivered to the enterprise as managed services, and help the enterprise offer new services to their end-customers including, AR, VR, content delivery, etc.

Cisco’s new service edge solution, Cisco Cloud Services Stack for Content Delivery uses Cisco’s validated cloud-native services stack with a dedicated cloud-native content delivery application to improve network congestion and quality of experience for video. This new offer enables a revenue-sharing model between Cisco and its service provider/content provider customers to unlock top-line growth, improving 5G profitability while helping to onboard new content creators quickly.

Introducing Cisco Cloud Services Stack for Residential

Cisco Cloud Services Stack for Residential is designed to improve network operations and performance across residential access networks. It enables a cloud-native architecture for the broadband network gateway by centralizing the control plane, improving network resiliency and simplifying operations. This cloud-native architectural approach also provides a distributed user plane improving overall network performance by pushing forwarding decisions closer to the user and opening up network architectures to embrace a new service edge for new revenue opportunities like content delivery.

New and Improved Routing Options for Mass-Scale Networking, open vRAN

Cisco is committed to be the leader in critical internet infrastructure. To help service providers converge services over one architecture to reduce costs, Cisco is launching new line cards for its Aggregation Services Routers (ASR) 9000 series, more than tripling the performance with high-density 400GbE interfaces. The new cards are ideal for edge routing use-cases across service providers, data center, and enterprise private backbones. Cisco is also introducing its new Network Convergence System (NCS) 5700 router featuring four times higher performance with high-density 400GbE interfaces.

Furthering progress with 5G open RAN, Cisco reveals today new models for its Cisco NCS 540 5G fronthaul router, providing seamless, packet-based transport of Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) streams. It offers 300Gbps system scale and the operational simplicity within a single Cisco IOS XR software environment from the core to the access network.

Cisco is also introducing the ability for service providers to monetize their trustworthy networks. For enterprise customers that demand a higher standard of secure connectivity, trusted routing paths can be created and offered as a premium service. Cisco Crosswork Trust Insights collects evidence to identify more trustworthy routing paths. Cisco’s Crosswork Optimization Engine then automates and optimizes routing paths based on trust metrics using segment routing.

More Automation = More Control: Cisco Debuts its Crosswork Network Controller

The Cisco Crosswork Network Controller is revolutionizing customer operations by streamlining complex tasks with a turnkey integrated solution to simplify end-to-end provisioning. Network operators will experience improvements in quality with intelligent bandwidth controls and visibility with network and services inventory, resulting in a faster time to revenue and time to remediate.