Mobile World Congress, Barcelona — Cisco’s head of networking held a roundtable at MWC that hit on many topics but was especially positive about the prospects of Cisco’s converged 4G and 5G core.
T-Mobile was one of the first big adopters of this technology. The number two U.S. Mobile Network Operator (MNO) implemented Cisco’s converged core last December, moving all of its 5G standalone (SA) and 4G traffic onto the cloud-native converged core gateway.
“Most infrastructure will move to this model,” claimed Cisco’s Jonathan Davidson during the discussion with multiple trade hacks, including Silverlinings, although he didn’t offer clarity on how long this will take to happen.
He said, however, using the containerized converged core will make managing the network simpler. Davidson said that typically the separate core is extremely complex.
He also added that Cisco is delivering especially fast software updates for the gateway to T-Mobile. He said that new software updates can be sent to T-Mobile every week, if necessary. This is hardly usual for most telecom software.
Check out our other coverage from Mobile World Congress here:
- Nokia rebrands with its head in the cloud
- Microsoft aims for telcos with next wave of Azure
- Silverlinings kicks off Day 1 at MWC
- NTT on moving 5G from 'carpeted world' to 'factory floor'
- Cisco’s converged future
- AWS plays the middleman between telco and the cloud
- Ericsson wins 5G SA deal in Spain with Orange
- MWC Day 2 wrap-up: 5G SA and core network transformation
- Surprise: F5 is now a cloud company
- MWC Day 3 wrap-up: cloud-native to the core, 5G and more
- Mavenir opens the way to cloud-native
- MWC: Orange Business sheds light on Project Sylva