For mobile service providers, the challenges — and opportunities! — have rarely been bigger.

Mobile demand from industry, enterprises, and consumers is rising steeply. And AI stands to transform both how mobile communications are executed and the kinds of experiences and services that users expect.

At the same time, bad actors target service providers with ever more sophisticated cyberthreats, many of them powered by AI.

In anticipation of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (an event powered by Cisco’s 6 GHz wireless innovation and AI solutions), we spoke with Masum Mir, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's provider mobility business. He shared his thoughts on an exciting time for mobile service providers, and the unique role Cisco plays in supporting their critical importance for business, industry, consumers, and society.

 

Thank you, Masum! It’s a complicated time for the mobility communications industry. Could you share a quick overview of the challenges providers face today?

Thanks, Kevin. The demand from the mobile network is not slowing down. And we're starting to see the early signs of traffic growth from AI — and something that did not exist a year or two ago, which is consumption of AI in consumer handsets moving into many businesses. That’s creating another new dimension of growth. Mobile providers have to be able to handle that growth. And also to participate in the business opportunity, as AI becomes more and more adopted by industries as well as consumers.

Cisco is supporting service providers through this transition in unique, differentiated ways. Let’s start with infrastructure.

We have been infrastructure partners from the early days of telecoms’ participation on the internet, then coming into mobile data. And we never stopped. We are not only investing in our silicon and platform and automation for hyperscalers and AI builders. We also continue to bring those capabilities to service providers and enterprises on simplified architecture, simplified networks, and with massive capacity gain and power reductions. And our journey towards a mobile platform approach is resonating especially well.

So, our technology supports growth.

Yes, and we not only work with communication service providers to help them build critical infrastructure. We also participate in net-new revenue creation for them. With our business services, we help operators around the world to serve large enterprises and small businesses.

Cisco supports Wireless for AI and AI for Wireless. Could you explain that?

More than 50% of AI activity from large language models is being consumed on a mobile network. And it is just rising and rising. So, at Cisco we are looking at AI in two ways. How do we bring AI to wireless network operations to create simplification and better security. But at the same time, help service providers to participate in the AI value chain by bringing AI inferencing services closer to end users — starting with industries and public sector, but to the consumer market as well.

You mentioned Cisco’s platform approach. How does it support simplicity and cost reductions?

Our shift towards a platform strategy enables operators to participate in net-new revenue streams, with lower incremental costs and without adding too much OpEx budget. We're getting a lot of positive input and feedback from our customers. They are appreciating the simplicity of our platform strategy and strategically aligning with Cisco going forward.

Silicon One is a key part of Cisco’s full-stack integration. How is it enabling mobile providers to meet the demands of AI?

Video is a predominant force, and AI is starting to find its way. They put a lot of pressure on the network. With our Silicon One chip architecture — as well as our approach to bringing routing and transmission optical tighter together with simplified operations — we’re significantly improving our customers’ ROI for the backbone network. And it is moving more towards the edge of their network as well. So, our innovation is definitely helping them to manage their costs and prepare for the continuing surge of bandwidth demand from consumers as well as enterprises going forward.

Cisco fuses security into the network. How does that empower service providers and build both simplicity and resilience?

More and more, critical infrastructure is relying on service providers. Everything from 911 calls to water and power utilities depend on it. So, security is critically important. And infusing security deep into the network becomes extremely important going forward. And we not only infuse security but give customers the tools and capabilities to manage threat and security risk in that infrastructure very effectively. And now with our Cisco Splunk data platform, we also give them enhanced capability to simplify their security operation.

Speaking of Splunk, how do Cisco — and Splunk — give customers visibility into every corner of the network and beyond?

Today, security management must expand everywhere, from the access network to the service creation layer to the backend and the core of the network. The beautiful piece that we deliver is that Splunk takes data from many, many sources. It’s multidimensional. So, you can take this multi-source data, normalize it, and operate at machine scale. That means you’re not only getting data from everywhere in the network, but you also can take and ingest data from outside of the network. And then take very measured, very rapid action to identify risk and protect your assets before it comes and bites you.

What excites you about the future, especially in terms of innovation and opportunities?

What excites me most importantly is the rise of AI. And physical AI creates immense opportunities that can be built on our platform strategy. Service providers around the world who are also our partners are extremely well positioned to lead that market. The question is not how big it is going to be? The question is going to be how fast we're going to see the shift of telecom operators leveraging their platform, building sovereign solutions and participating in this AI value chain and make physical AI a reality everywhere in the world in a very, very democratic way. So that it's not a right of only the most advanced nations, but every nation. Every society should have access, equal access to secure trusted AI ecosystems for their consumer needs as well as their business needs.

And Cisco's going to be there all the way.

Cisco is going to be the catalyst to make that happen.