Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins has told ZDNet that Cisco is working on a 5G innovation to be launched later this year with customers, pointing out that the networking giant is responsible for much of the infrastructure underpinning the delivery of 5G.
Speaking with ZDNet during Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando on Monday, Robbins said 5G has become a lot more concrete in 2018, kicking off with multiple announcements during Mobile World Congress[1] (MWC) of concrete deployments.
"Think about it: Once traffic leaves the base station, it's all us," Robbins told ZDNet, with
5G therefore "incredibly important" to the networking giant's business.
Cisco is able to assist carriers in upgrading their existing mobile infrastructure to prepare for 5G, he explained.
"There is a lot of reality behind plans for 5G and contemplating actually the need to upgrade core infrastructure to support the amount of bandwidth at the edge," he said.
"If 5G lives up to its billings, which we think it will, then the core networks of these server providers who deliver the networks are going to have to really evolve to be able to accommodate it, and we're spending a lot of time talking to customers right now.
"We've also been working on innovation that is going to be delivered later this year that actually will be part of that solution for many of our customers."
Read also: Cisco Live 2018: CEO Chuck Robbins pushes tighter datacentre security[2]
During MWC in February, Cisco had launched its 5G Now portfolio[3], at the time saying it was aiming to help customers manage multi-cloud workloads across the "full ecosystem of private, public, and hybrid clouds to