Robust switches, faster Wi-Fi and private 5G shape Cisco’s view of a hybrid work future

The past two years have taught the world that working from home can sometimes be just as effective as working in the office.

While there were people working remotely prior to the start of 2020, the onset of a global pandemic significantly changed the equation. A Gallup survey in the fall of last year found that 45% of full-time U.S. employees now work from home either all or part of the time.

Moreover, two-thirds of employees in white-collar jobs reported working remotely. And 90% of already remote workers indicated they would like to continue that arrangement in some way.

Statistics such as these offer a glimpse of the sea change taking place in how the workplace is defined. This, in turn, is reshaping enterprise requirements for a hybrid network that is flexible, scalable, secure and cost effective with the lowest latency possible.

“Work is not a place that you could go to, but it’s a place you could be where ultimately you are trying to get work done,” said Lawrence Huang, vice president of product management at Cisco Meraki, a division of Cisco Systems Inc. “It is supporting that quality of experience no matter where you choose to work from. A big part of that is investing in infrastructure to support new ways of working.”

Huang spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, as part of the “Cisco: Powering Hybrid Work” event. During the event, Vellante also interviewed Cisco’s Muhammad Imam, director of technical marketing, Enterprise Networks Business; Masum Mir, VP and general manager of the Cable & Mobile Business Unit; and Greg Dorai, VP of product, secure access, enterprise networking and cloud. The discussion focused on a series of new product releases that Cisco announced in February and how the company is leveraging its networking expertise to drive the hybrid work model. (* Disclosure below.)

Expansion through Wi-Fi 6E

With its longstanding presence in the networking world, Cisco finds itself in a position to significantly influence the technology direction for hybrid work. It holds a 55% share of the enterprise network infrastructure market and at least half of the ethernet switch business.

Cisco has sized up the market opportunity for hybrid work and determined that the road to expanding network capacity and performance runs through Wi-Fi 6E.

This special designation for the Wi-Fi 6 wireless standard broadcasts on the re-opened 6GHz band. It is a part of the spectrum previously reserved for emergency broadcasts and is more than twice as wide as the 5GHz band below it. Like an expansion of a one-lane country lane to a multi-lane superhighway, the opening of Wi-Fi 6E offers an opportunity for significantly higher volumes of traffic.

“What can customers do to expand the number of lanes which they can support for wireless traffic?” Huang asked. “Many of them are looking to Wi-Fi 6E as the answer to help them do that. It’s because 6GHz, as part of that standard, introduces a whole new spectrum or a whole new highway we can get client devices on.”

In early February, Cisco announced plans to extend Wi-Fi 6E to the Catalyst 9136 and Meraki MR57 access points, which will double the amount of radio frequency spectrum available for Wi-Fi use.

Why is this important for hybrid work? One outcome from two years of a pandemic is that business is increasingly being conducted over video conference platforms. Wi-Fi 6E improves support for collaboration tools using 4K and 8K video.

“We are seeing increasing demand on networks, and that stems from some of the most recent trends,” Imam noted. “It will be a video-dominant hybrid workspace.”

Upgrades for Catalyst switches

Expansion of the Wi-Fi highway is just one element in meeting the hybrid work challenge. Another is boosting the engine power of the devices that “drive” on it.

Even though Wi-Fi 6E offers the promise of greater capacity and performance for platforms using collaborative applications, the routers that process traffic can rapidly become choke points if they are incapable of matching application speed and throughput.

“Wi-Fi 6E is making multigigabit Wi-Fi possible,” Imam said. “High density of multigigabit is becoming very common as we evolve our Wi-Fi networks, because we don’t want our wired infrastructure to be the bottleneck when the wireless infrastructure is capable of going more than one gig.”

To address this issue, Cisco unveiled a new series of core switches, branded as Catalyst 9000X, in early February. The 9300X, 9400X and 9500X/9600X switches are geared to support traffic generated from the boost in wireless capacity.

The latest iterations of the Catalyst line also provide insight into Cisco’s evolving strategy around silicon. The new 9500X and 9600X switches include Cisco Silicon One Q200 ASICs.

Until this recent announcement, Silicon One had only been implemented for web-scale and service-provider networks. The integration of Silicon One into the Catalyst offering provides enterprise customers with programming flexibility and a reduction in power consumption for vertical industries angling for increased levels of capacity.

“With Silicon One, we are taking it to another level,” Imam said. “Silicon One brings the capabilities of the Unified Data Access Plane ASIC and unlocks the scale and high performance in enterprise switches.”

Rollout of Private 5G

Cisco released a significant amount of detail around its Wi-Fi 6E and Catalyst deployments as part of the announcements in early February surrounding hybrid work. Tucked into its press release was a brief mention that it would also introduce Cisco Private 5G for the enterprise as a managed service.

“We’re looking at Private 5G with the lens of enterprise, what the enterprise really needs,” Mir said. “It is not only connecting remote workers, but also bringing people, things and spaces together.”

A link to a blog post from Mir accompanied the Private 5G announcement and provided additional information around Cisco’s new offering. The company plans to reveal more about its go-to-market strategy for Private 5G at Mobile World Congress at the end of February.

Private 5G is a mobile network that allows the owner to customize a wireless network with dedicated bandwidth and infrastructure to meet specific needs, such as industrial internet of things. Deloitte Consulting LLP has predicted that private 5G will likely become the preferred choice for many of the world’s largest enterprises.

With its announcement this month, Cisco is joining a number of major players building a presence in the private 5G market. Amazon Web Services Inc. announced a preview of its AWS Private 5G service in November. Verizon Communications Inc. has introduced its own offering, and Red Hat Inc. believes that a software-defined private 5G solution can be implemented at the edge with its OpenShift Container Platform.

Cisco’s message, based on exclusive SiliconANGLE interviews with Mir and Dorai, is that enterprises should not have to choose between Wi-Fi and 5G wireless standards to run a business and accelerate the transition to hybrid work.

“We believe the combination of Wi-Fi 6E and 5G for private networks is going to accelerate that journey,” Mir said. “We are going to create a continuum; enterprises don’t have to make a hard choice.”

The industrial use case offers a fertile field for this approach. Early adopters of private 5G include Bosh, Fujitsu, General Motors and Ford. Cisco’s strategy for private 5G in factory environments could offer significant appeal, according to Dorai.

“When you are connecting your phone or laptop for basic browsing, Wi-Fi is sufficient,” Dorai explained. “But if it’s a process automation factory where you need seven nines of reliability, Private 5G is the better technology. These two technologies, 5G and Wi-Fi 6E, are going to work hand in hand to deliver awesome outcomes.”

The reality is that many of the world’s chief executives have been trying to get hybrid right for the past two years. While there has been success for some, there have been plenty of roadblocks as well, as companies have endeavored to build an infrastructure that is flexible, scalable and cost effective.

It’s a tricky combination, and Cisco is betting that the next generation of wireless and new switching technologies will improve the transition to hybrid work.

“No one could have predicted the world that we’re operating and living in,” said Huang. “It’s about investing in architectures and platforms that are flexible, that allow our customers to support use cases they were thinking of, as well as ones they never anticipated.”

Stay tuned for the full event video. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Cisco: Powering Hybrid Work” event. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Rido81