Next Stop: Mobile Internet

Transcript

Introduction

Peter Shaplen: Hello and welcome. Larry Lang is Cisco senior vice president and the general manager of the services and mobility business unit. Nice to meet you.

Larry Lang: Nice to meet you too. Glad to be here.

Interview

Peter Shaplen: What's the message that you're taking to the mobile world congress that is market transformative? What haven't they heard before that they're going to hear from you?

Larry Lang: Our message is gonna be to look beyond just the radio interface. To look at the architecture of the whole network to understand that it is becoming, the mobile internet. It needs to be architected that way. And that's an architectural departure, for people who are used to engineering networks primarily for carrying phone calls. Some text messages, but primarily phone calls. We have a whole new architectural, demand put upon them. And, uh, our experience at Cisco helping internet service providers build out the fixed internet, we think is gonna have a lot of bearing on the architectural direction that they need to bring there.

Peter Shaplen: That's happening faster than some of them expected. What, give us a sense of that speed, uh, and that timeline.

Larry Lang: Speed and then also, the assumptions of how the traffic flows are different. I think the original assumption in a lot of the mobile operators is that they would run a sort of central set of content. Probably the best way to compare it, the people familiar would be what AOL did. Your own content, and people connect to your network and go to this content. But just as we learned with AOL, content is much broader than any one operator. And so there's a large amount of traffic that's going what people call off deck, meaning not to the, the service providers. As soon as the traffic goes, off deck it becomes very important to route it quickly to where it wants to go. The original design assumptions were very hierarchical. You start at the radios and you sort of flow towards the data centers of the operator themselves. But suppose that traffic is coming from a laptop that's encrypted. It's just meant to go back to your, company. There's no reason to haul it all the way to this enterprise, so rather than having it as hierarchical network, the trend that people will be talking about will be the move towards a flat network. Meaning a network where there isn't a built in assumption that you're going to one place. Instead the, the network is designed so that as soon as the traffic enters, you can figure out where it's going and send it there directly. In a much more efficient way.

Peter Shaplen: What is the next gen of mobility look like?

Larry Lang: I think the next generation of mobility probably extrapolates out from what we see going on with social networking, and, rating sites. Because it's so easy to do wherever you go. You go to a restaurant, you go to a movie, anywhere you can very quickly enter something about your opinions and people really like sharing their opinions.

Peter Shaplen: To ask this question, uh, politely but bluntly, Cisco is not necessarily the name that all, that automatically comes to mind in all this.

Larry Lang: There is this whole need to have a core network, that's ready to handle the, this mobile traffic that's increasingly looks like internet traffic. I'd say well it's not so much that Cisco is entering, uh, mobile as much as mobile is coming to the internet. And turns out we're already there. So it's really that combination of technologies, the radios. One that's very important is Wifi. but also the cellular style radios. Combined with this internet core, these packets which is this internet technology that we're the leader in worldwide.

Peter Shaplen: We end up, uh, hearing about three G. We end up hearing about four G. What's the difference and when will wee see four G?

Larry Lang: Actually the most common, radio technology in the world is still a second generation, or two G technology called, GSM, global system for mobile telecommunications. And, three G has become more widespread over the past several years. Three G is based on something called CDMA. Four G based on something called OFDMA.

Peter Shaplen: And explain the, the acronym.

Larry Lang: Codivision multiple access and orthogonal frequency division multiple access.

Peter Shaplen: I'm so glad I asked, I'm sorry, continue.

Larry Lang: What I'd say is that, that for most people they really shouldn't worry about that. I think what's going to happen is there's gonna be more and more different radio technologies. Two G, three G, four G. Wifi, Wimax, a whole bunch of different radio technologies. I think what's important for us as we think about it from the end user's point of view is what do they actually want? They want a mobile internet experience, and experience of always being connected about being able to get good speeds. Usable speeds.
And instead have a good experience wherever they go where it's quick to connect, low latency, and, and fun, or productive depending whether they're in their sort of social or business environment. And I think we need to actually make the technology fade into the background.

Peter Shaplen: How should those who follow, Cisco, analysts both of technology, but financial as well, what should they be looking at in order to measure or watch for success?

Larry Lang: Certainly there'll be the ongoing, financial metrics I think the other part that you'll see pervading more and more of what we do is just a natural sense that mobile is a part of the system from the original conception. Before I joined Cisco I was with the Bell system, and, I remember when mobile first came up, there was this tendency to think of, of the main telephone network. And then off to the side there was sort of this weird accessory, cellular network that was for, oh I don't know, rich doctors or stock brokers or something like that. Not most people and it was certainly not the main network. In retrospect, that clearly was not the right way to frame it. The, the mobile network became the main network. We who work in the internet need to stop thinking of mobile as kind of this kind of curious add on. There's the main internet that you experience when you're sitting at a computer. And there's this sort of weird add on thing that, that a few people use. Instead, I think it's going to become central to the experience. In some ways already is as you look at all the Wifi connected laptops. But that's just the beginning of the journey. And so I think one way to measure this success will be the increasing, foundational aspect of mobile and everything we do, and the technologies we develop. The business propositions we put forth. Just the way we approach the task of our work everyday.

Peter Shaplen: What are the things that you see that excite you the most?

Larry Lang: Those of us who work in developing new technology always live somewhat in the future. So depending on what you're working on, maybe eighteen months from now, twenty four months from now, the exciting news for us is that, the recession's already over. What we're working on now will have to be ready because this recession just like all before it, will end. Uh, and when it does, we'll need to be ready and just as importantly, our service provider customers will be ready. One of the messages I want to bring forth to there is that while of course we have to watch our costs, we have to avoid retreating into a bunker. We have to get ready because when this ends, I expect that right at the forefront of what demand growth will involve is this area of the mobile internet. And so we need to be at the very least making the design choices and architectural decisions now. So that as we come out of it and as that growth resumes, we're ready both with the equipment that Cisco produces, but also with all the systems that are integrated by these operators, to get ready for that.

Peter Shaplen: Larry Lang is senior vice president and GM of the service and mobility unit at Cisco. And we spoke with him in his office in San Jose. Thanks very much.

Larry Lang: Thank you.

Peter Shaplen: This and an archive of news at Cisco podcast can be found at newsroom dot Cisco dot com.

Peter Shaplen: For Cisco, I'm Peter Shaplen.